Ann is Accenture's Managing Director and Utilities Industry Lead for Asia Pacific. Ann has a particular specialism in the evolution of smart grids and smart cities. Her focus is on providing thought leadership in the areas of corporate strategy and complex business transformation. She has spent the last few years researching consumer engagement trends and has a clear point of view on the impact of emerging business models and known trends in the adoption of energy efficiency. She participates in the Executive of Smart Grid Australia and is the Chair of the Consumer Working Group.
1. Can you share with us an example of how governments in the developed world have transformed “brownfield” cities with old infrastructure and housing, into smart cities?
Amsterdam is in the midst of an ambitious programme to become the first Intelligent City in Europe. The goal of the project is to develop and implement sustainable and cost-effective programmes that will help Amsterdam reduce its carbon footprint while exceeding the carbon reduction targets put forward by the European Union’s 2020 emissions and energy reduction targets.
The programme has three primary objectives in terms of environmental impact: A 40 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2025; reliance on 20 percent renewable energy by 2015; and achieving total CO2 neutrality by 2015. Accomplishing these objectives involves bringing together various technologies and approaches that include smart meters, smart grid, electric vehicles, and intelligent building design to promote energy efficiency in the residential, commercial, public and transportation economic sectors.
Keys to the success of this Intelligent City initiative in Amsterdam include integrating the multiple components of the Intelligent City service domains across city departments, developing a smart grid infrastructure and close collaboration between a private and public sector consortium.
2. You’ve said that smart meter technology will become a part of everyday life in future. What are the requirements for this to happen and how can barriers to its mass deployment, such as cost and lack of infrastructure, be overcome?
Across the global electricity market, a growing number of utilities are implementing and leveraging smart metering technology. The 10 largest deployments worldwide are forecast to add 500 million smart meters by 2020, approximately tripling the current installed base. The Asia Pacific region is set to dominate the global deployment, with China leading the way with an installed smart meter population that could potentially approach 400 million by that date.
But despite these ongoing rollouts, utilities face a broad set of challenges to effective deployment of smart metering, including lack of regulatory support, an undefined business case, technology choices and data management. Additionally many utilities are still unclear about the optimal route to extracting value from these large investments.
Accenture has identified five critical success factors to help utilities realise the benefits of smart meters. Putting the customer at the heart of the design will be key because customers need to feel that the solution has been designed for their benefit if it is to achieve behavioural change. Managing the complexities of deployment within the business by ensuring that leadership can articulate a shared vision, achieve alignment across roles, responsibilities and metrics, and implement thorough end-to-end testing, will be critical. Effectively managing the business change across employees, operational processes and customers will also be important. As will future proofing the technology solution and realising additional value by applying advanced data analytics capabilities.
3. Positive consumer values and behaviour is crucial to the success of smart grids and smart cities. What are some best practices of consumer engagement by governments and utility providers that have resulted in optimal outcomes and how can these be applied across ASEAN?
Governments have begun to recognise the centrality of smart grids as an enabler for a set of low-carbon technologies, and are increasingly viewing smart grids as a strategic infrastructure investment that will enable their long-term economic prosperity and help them to achieve their carbon emission reduction targets.
A critical success factor for ensuring successful implementation and adoption is consumer engagement, both in communicating effectively with the consumer and in delivering high-quality implementations in unpredictable field environments.
Consumer outreach programmes and ongoing product/service support are critical. Within these outreach programmes, utilities need to communicate messages in clear, common language; adopting new techniques, channels and incentive schemes to build trust and to explain the value proposition to consumers in their everyday lives.
Utilities should encourage collective problem solving in the field, eliciting and responding to consumer feedback and ensuring the skills and flexibility are in place to successfully re- engineer improvements in technology and the business process. This is particularly important, where any lapse in performance has the potential for a long-term, detrimental impact on the consumer’s perception of smart grid and their relationship with their energy provider.
4. Accenture recently launched a demand response customer billing system for Yokohama in Japan. How does this billing system aim to promote energy efficiency and how easily could this be replicated in other Asian cities?
The demand response customer billing system built by Accenture for the Yokohama Smart City Project (YSCP) is designed to increase energy efficiency and reduce peak demand for electricity.
Leveraging advanced analytics capabilities, the demand response customer billing system is able to use weather forecasts and residents’ energy usage data to analyze and predict times of high demand. It will also provide incentives for residents to reduce their electricity usage.
The results from the on-going field test will help YSCP determine residents’ habits, as well as their needs and preferences when it comes to energy use and conservation.
The demand response billing system also will support building energy management systems, electric vehicles and vehicle charging stations within the areas served by the YSCP. Billing and electricity usage information is made available to residents, allowing them to adjust their energy consumption in line with their needs; while YSCP is able to more effectively manage the city’s supply and demand of electricity.
5. With ASEAN facing rapid growth in energy demand, how can utility providers overcome ageing infrastructure to achieve more value from their generation assets? What should the core competencies of the next-generation energy provider be?
As the dependence on a constant supply of electricity increases, customers are becoming less forgiving of interruptions. A number of instances of high-profile failures, such as in India during the summer of 2012 when half a billion people were left without power, have focused attention on the need to maintain and replace ageing infrastructure.
The investment landscape is going to depend on support from three key stakeholders – the government/regulators, customers and the utilities themselves.
Distribution networks around the world must respond to a number of major energy industry challenges in order to safeguard the ongoing delivery of electricity to consumers. These include ensuring reliability and resilience of supply; energy security and independence; control over rising electricity costs, support for demand growth; environmental sustainability; and evolving distributed generation technologies.