Missing the point

Have a look at this post. Short version - it's my friend Tim Ryan's latest missive in a long line of thoughts and reposts on work concerning research attempts which, at their start, attempt to understand social aspects around energy use and which at their tail end hope to influence system design.

It does grate at me a little, and so is worth this wee little article.

It's another post describing work which (often in whole or part taxpayer-funded) is well-intended but doesn't realise it may be an anchor on progress for the very interests it seeks to represent.

If that sounds provocative on a number of fronts, let me explain.

The ends in this particular example are fantastic - we won't fundamentally move underlying generation costs reflecting the needs of some customers at the expense of raising net costs any more than we can reschedule the sun or dictate the wind. Nor is the work novel; there's no shortage of information in most companies selling energy products to understand the very same social issues; there's often significant public domain data also. Some of the assertions in the article linked from Tim's post below (click through it's there) make assumptions and inferences of product design efforts in industry that simply aren't true.

Another example on recent work concerns social explorations on V2G intending to influence many things which ultimately include the technologies enabling applications and uses that people will engage with. That's great, save that there's been plenty of work to these ends done 10-20 years ago elsewhere and whilst those efforts were Not Invented Here the technologies, standards and frameworks enabling applications and uses that our market is headed to assume were developed from said understandings. In short our newfound interest in directing research dollars to understand people and their relationships with energy and energy technology are not likely to be effective with what's actually on fire per se, and (despite a real need to maintain currency, particularly in some segments e.g., CALD) they are neither novel. The article Tim reposts opines thus:

"The industry has traditionally flattened the complex lives of people into something that fits a model of the imagined way that they look at people.”

Having worked with a good bit of industry and involved product designers therein, let me assure you... that's bullshit. The latter group in particular doesn't forget how to do their jobs the second they enter the energy sector, and there's no Men-In-Black-spec Neuralizer screening them on the way in either.

The less-sexy-and-more-exxy question is why, if with all this data, hasn't the energy industry created products better representative of social needs?

With some experience working in a range of industries and environments including those affected here, I'd respectfully suggest that:

• Good product design (and execution thereof) is genuinely hard,
• Attracting good product design resources to traditional energy industry is hard, and
• The economics of standing up products to suit market-segmented or otherwise non-traditional ends in the traditional energy industry are, in many cases, prohibitive.

In many cases it's not that energy products to better suit people don't exist for lack of knowledge of people or a lack of interest to understand them (these efforts do exist, and in my experiences tend to use specialists and are sincere/diligent in nature). But there are material, significant access barriers to use this knowledge and take products to market from it, not least of which is an industry reality that's high in net revenue but low and decreasing in margin. The resultant Sausage Machine of Adjacent Stuff ends up seeing very large energy companies (after a Big Think and a Big Spend) hire Edgy and Interesting People to churn out e.g., a parody of Tesla's app for well-heeled EV owners, stick a special tariff against as much and call it progress. At best.

This said we have some good, emerging anomalies in market; at the high-capital end Reposit Power quite literally flips risk models on all fronts towards something able to be readily engaged with; at the other, Amber Electric - which on the face of it passes through spot for prosumers through retired engineers - effectively democratises the creation of energy products connecting people with needs and creators that can serve them through reduced access barriers to standing up relevant product. And, to be fair, the big players are making sincere efforts to get better.

That's where the effort needs to be - to reduce barriers connecting people and product. Whilst understanding people is an evolving space worthy of ongoing enquiry, it's certainly not something underappreciated - and a completeness of understanding (if possible) would only have us reach the very point much of industry is already stuck at. Australia's energy industry doesn't need more faux progress: the hand-clapping and back-slapping around rebranding 'DER' to something that included the word 'consumer' certainly raised industry entropy though, to date, has resulted in (precisely) zero marginal work output against the pre-rebrand status quo; not unexpected given successful efforts in other markets with DER proliferation being more structured around objectively-identified challenges.

We need to focus on the problem, Tim - to lower barriers between people and product. No focus, no progress.