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Blowback Attack: The Smart Grid’s Greatest Danger? By Guest Editorial Feb 9, 2010 - 12:54:23 PM
Editor’s note: The author is a member of a Smart Grid Demonstration project partnership between the LADWP and a consortium of top Southern California research institutes including USC, UCLA, and CalTech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The project is intended to “green the grid” by developing, deploying and testing advanced Smart Grid technologies. It uses USC and UCLA as testing grounds for innovative technologies to prove the viability of the demonstration technology, and serve as microcosms of the entire city. It is currently the only Department of Energy funded project to have a socio-behavioral component. These behavioral studies will generate ongoing observations, data, and analysis for integration and support of the demand response program.
By Erica Watson-Currie
Our team has been observing discussions and comments on existing forums to gain a baseline reading of public sentiment. We’ve discovered most of the resistance centers on the following common themes: .
Unfortunate Analogy Shift
Electrical power is moving from a water analogy to an information analogy. For decades, power consumers have accepted physicists’ explanations (or their electrician’s description) using a common and familiar – thereby comforting – set of vocabulary matches to an element we lay people better understood: water. That is, it travels in waves and flows through power lines.
When things work properly, current is delivered to a desired point (e.g., one’s toaster, computer, or hair dryer). Broken, frayed, or improperly insulated cables could leak electricity, flooding someone with a nasty surge of voltage. Like aqueducts, power lines become blocked or jammed, resulting in none of the desired current getting through.
With Smart Grid’s advent comes a new analogy, slipping into a data model to describe how it works. Smart Grid enables electrons to be routed past outages or breaks. It will have hubs and servers, and be “intelligent” enough to sense when to use packet-shifting-like-abilities to bypass overloaded or impassable areas, to route power to desired locations.
This all takes place on a network (data analogy), rather than power coming to us via conduits (a water analogy).
Fostering Dystopian Perceptions
Since most end-users just barely understood electricity to begin with, replacing comfortable fluid analogies and terms with tech-savvy Internet-speak compounds our confusion. Humans instinctively fear what we don’t understand. Add terminology suggesting our machines are becoming intelligent (sentient even!), evokes the opening of Terminator movies or the Matrix. Labeling the grid as “smart” and suggesting that electricity travels like data or information, provokes suspicion and alarm about what sort of information it may carry along with it. Rather than a one-way stream like water, power as data offers two-way transmission of information. This awakens fears of government monitoring. It’s not enough that Homeland Security measures provoked fears of wire-tapping; now it’s the wires themselves doing the snooping and reporting.
Continuing to “explain” Smart Grid using analogies which fail to generate end-user understanding; using utilities’ rate structures to reward those who cede control and punish those who refuse; and increasing governmental regulatory actions will result in fueling these fears, increasing end-users’ opposition and resistance.
Erica Watson-Currie holds a BA in Psychology, MA in Communication Management, and a PhD in Communication Theory. In addition to her work as a member of the Socio-Behavioral team on the Smart Grid Demonstration project, she also consults on customer/employee satisfaction and marketing. Information available at Thinker Consulting.
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