The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative’s 2011 Report is a baseline document summarizing the research on consumer beliefs, attitudes and concerns. We’ve looked at ways to start the adoptive cycle, and the importance of recognizing regional attitudes.
Today: the mechanics of utility options and interfaces.

A year ago I wrote about our deep retrofit project at our 119-year-old farmhouse in Vermont. We buttoned up significantly, reducing air infiltration by 72%, and adding a solar hot water system to reduce our dependence on propane.
Lately I've been wondering about our savings in heating oil, propane and electricity.  A quick year-over-year comparison yields the following savings.

Last week we checked out the psychology of early adopters, as summarized by Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative’s 2011 State of the Consumer Report.
Once a disruptive technology has crossed the chasm and established a foothold, the question becomes: How do we engage the broader population – a population segmented by varying motivations and preferences?

That's the question posed by Stuart Hickox of One Change (www.onechange.org) in this very thoughtful post at MediaPost in its Marketing:Green section (http://bit.ly/gQwlIz).
Hickox, one of the deep thinkers on energy efficiency and consumer adoption, bemoans the billions of dollars spent on getting people to change their energy consumption behaviors and the trifling progress we've made in North America. He reports that only 100,000 deep energy efficiency retrofits have been performed on homes in the U.S., despite the considerable energy savings that each yielded.

I just came across this post, "Five Things to Know About LED Lighting" (http://bit.ly/e5V1WD). It's short and sweet and helpful as consumers begin to encounter LED bulbs on the shelves of retail stores.
Here are the first two nuggets.

Put this one on your must-read list: The 2011 State of the Consumer Report by Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC). It’s 38 pages of clear, comprehensive meta-analysis, compiling research and insights of over 80 studies and white papers.
In coming weeks, we’ll dig into a few of the report’s eight major topics.
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First up: early adopters.�
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Geoffrey A. Moore’s 1991 best seller Crossing the Chasm examined the way in which early adopters of disruptive technologies provide the foothold for later adoption and acceptance.
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Identifying those early adopters is an important first step. The report culls out three particular groups:
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Technophiles: Early adopters are often high awareness, knowledgeable consumers who embrace technology. Take Best Buy’s ideal customer: someone who participates in social networks, owns a smart phone, and is a married homeowner earning over $50,000 per year.
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Personal Experience: Early adopters might have lived through major storms that have caused widespread outages for several days, engendering regional support and acceptance for upgrading the grid.
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Greens with Flexibility: Those committed to the environment comprise an obvious third group, but such households must also have the willingness to commit time and personal resources to the cause. Those who are just too busy or distracted lag behind their fellow environmentalists. A focus on attainable goals and simple behavioral changes will engage this group.
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These early adopters, motivated by a higher sense of purpose and commitment - even a gee-whiz love of technology - will champion change and engagement, setting the adoption cycle in motion.

Time-of-use technologies, dynamic pricing schemes and fluctuating rates. They’re important for creating a conservation culture. The more we know and understand about rates and load demands, the more we can begin to conserve and modify our power use patterns.
Understanding this idea is pretty simple. But getting customers to accept and embrace time-of-use (TOU) schemes is another matter. Greentech Media recently outlined a few requirements of a well-designed TOU plan. Besides accurate billing and a responsive call center, consider these must-do’s:

Fifty-six percent of Americans haven't heard the term "smart grid," according to an online poll of 3,171 adults conducted by The Harris Poll in February. And even more women polled were unfamiliar with the term (66%, compared to 46% of men).

That's a problem for utilities getting ready to roll out their smart grid initiatives in the coming months.

The consumer today is so far ahead of marketers that we need to pole vault to catch up.  The way in which consumers live their lives and the way in which we work as marketers is disconnected.  Consumers' lives are hectic and challenging each day, and consumers quickly change to meet the oncoming challenges.  The current economic situation highlights their ability to change quickly.  Consumers are earning less money and spending it very differently, thus changing their lifestyles.  Maybe the rich continue to live in the old world, but the new world economy has consumers living much more thoughtfully about their buying decisions.
Yet as professional marketers, we cross some invisible line when we get to work each day and attempt to hold on to the past.  Or at best we attempt to integrate the past with tactical shifts to how we market our products and services.  The world has shifted dramatically and marketing has to leap frog into the new world.  We need to stop thinking and doing through the rearview mirror.

As we watch scenes of unspeakable tragedy and devastation in Japan, it’s right that we revisit questions of energy security and resiliency in the event of attack or disaster.

Just how resilient is our current electrical grid? Could a smarter grid mitigate the effects of a similar disaster here at home? Most U.S. states have some risk of earthquakes. A malicious cyber attack could indiscriminately damage or disable generation, transmission, distribution and/or storage infrastructure.