energy data and efficiency

Dennis D. McDonald on data & energy use:

What kind of culture changes will be needed, I wonder, both for energy utility staff and for customers when customers are able to make a much more direct connection between the devices they use at home and their monthly bill? This change has the potential for making the customer-company relationship more interactive than it is now. This raises some interesting questions:

* Who is going to teach customers how to best manage their energy consumption?
* Will the energy company’s call center staff have to develop a new set of counseling and advice-giving skills?
* What new tools will control room staff need to monitor distribution network performance, and will these tools take into account human-supplied information alongside automatically-supplied data from the grid and its increasing number of sensors?

(via jon udell)