Energy is for Everybody ... Sooner than You Think

There was a time when the phone company - Ma Bell - was synonymous with making a voice connection - a phone call. One came with the other, and this vital service was a commodity delivered by a monopoly. This was the era of wall telephones, dial-tone, and "hurry up, its long distance" shouts to the family from the hallway. For many if not most readers, this may have been before your time, and it may be a little hard to understand a world that doesn't include myriad options for peer-to-peer voice (landline, cell phone, FaceTime, voice messages, Skype, etc) or data (fax, text, IM, blogs, comments, social networks, and on and on). We're way past the Telephone era. Those in the telecom industry call those old dial-tone related services "POTS" for Plain Old Telephone Service.

But when it comes to energy, folks, we're largely still in that era. Your local equivalent of Ma Bell, your local electric utility company, provides that valuable service of bringing the lifeblood of the digital economy, electricity, to your home or business. Electricity today resembles yesterday's dial-tone connectivity. It's a monopoly service and you depend on one company, unless you live in a deregulated area where you can choose from a variety of retail provider options, but with each offer providing basically the same thing, just with different pricing packages. The fact is, we don't have anything yet in energy that resembles the choices on the menu of communication options that we have today. But we're going to. Soon. Still, for now, we remain in what we might call the "POES" era, utterly dependent on low-cost, high-reliability Plain Old Electric Service from an electric utility or retail company. Keep it coming, by all means, but dare we hope for more?

For most of us in the developed world, access to POES is so affordable and reliable that we hardly think about it until a system outage - a blackout - takes it away suddenly, usually for a short while, but increasingly with extreme weather, maybe for days at a time. In fact, we should never take POES for granted, because behind that low cost and high reliability "dial-tone" electricity we depend upon is a complex machine of grid operators, linemen and women, regulators, and vendors working night and day to keep this most complex machine running in the background. We need the massive infrastructure, the fleets of dedicated workers at the utilities, and most of all, we need the POES they provide.

But increasingly, we're seeing hints that there is more behind the curtain. Each news item from Tesla about batteries or electric vehicles, perhaps an article on solar photo voltaic systems (PV), or something about LED lighting, teases us with some ill-defined future, compelling but fuzzy. Now, that future is just over the next hill, look for lots more in these spaces in the days, weeks, and months to come. But as you do, take a step back and pause for a moment, and consider the role that energy plays in your life. We all have a role to play with energy, we all consume energy, but we all could become much more than consumers as the next era unfolds. What do you want from energy? How far does your imagination go in this area? Can you get creative in this area? Where do you begin?

When I think about the near future of energy, I go beyond POES, and I can't help but reflect on my personal journey beyond POTS. I reflect back to my first non-AT&T telephone in my first apartment in the early 1980s, my first cordless phone, the first time I heard about PCs, then my first Mac experience, and the lunch and learn brown bag I went to back in 1994 on something called the internet. Soon thereafter, there was the fax modem my wife bought me for Christmas, so I could get online using my Apple computer. And then as Y2K approached, time speeded up, and there were so many more first experiences over the next twenty years, as I got deeper and deeper into this telecom revolution. Blogging in 2005. Web Publishing. Social Networks. I reflect that its been a steady climb along two vectors: ever greater value and ever greater personalization, yielding both greater abundance and more independence.

And that's where we're heading with energy - up and up this mountain of ever greater value and ever greater personalization, into greater abundance and more independence. We're entering an era where Energy is for Everybody. It will be everywhere, and everyone will have the option to become a producer. The utilities will still be here providing POES, just like ATT, Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast are still here providing POTS. But utility roles will shift and some will lead the charge, and many more will move over to make room for new players.

My question for you - will you be among those new players? What will your role become? After all, if Energy is for Everybody, then we each will have more and more choices in the coming months and years. How will you treat this opportunity? Will it be a chance to lead and create a new world? Will you become a dabbler in a wait-and-see mode? Or will you stay a ringside witness at a great show? Or will you be the one holding on to the past, the one who hears a disturbing nuisance outside and wishes it would go away?

The ball is in the court of the energy consumer now. That means you. Energy is for Everybody. Time to get smart. Time to get going.