confronted a more pessimistic view that
the hyper-partisanship in Washington
is standing in the way of any meaningful progress. Perhaps my most memorable exchange took place at an event
organized by my dear friend and convener-in-chief, Coach Kathy Kemper, on
the growing interest in the ‘Internet of
Things.’
“Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer expressed some skepticism as to our
nation’s ability to fully harness the power
of information technology, citing a paper
he co-authored in the 1970s on ‘time of
use’ pricing models that were expected to
dramatically accelerate energy efficiency,
but fell short, in part on the failure of our
governance system. He mused of a new
‘call to action’ on elevating civics education. He asked why we couldn’t harness
these technologies to cull together a 21st
century civics curriculum to include a minilecture by President Obama on the original Magna Carta, opening up the treasure
trove of artifacts held at the U.S. Constitution Center and across our network of
libraries, among other ideas.”
Chopra continues: “I responded with
three points: First, that part of the problem
on realizing the value of time-of-use pricing was an information gap between data
held by the utilities on energy utilization
(and the regulators on the specific rate
plans) and the creativity of entrepreneurs
a na l y t i c s
competing on how to best present that
data for action by consumers. I shared an
example from the book on Green Button
(www.greenbuttondata.org), a voluntarilydesigned data standard adopted at first by
three of California’s largest utilities to open
up machine-readable access to energy
usage data by consumers (and through
Green Button Connect, their trusted third
parties). Within a week of Green Button’s
launch, an entrepreneur in New York City
built ‘Watt Quiz,’ a game that pulled in rate
and usage data to inform consumers on
the best rate plan that would save them
money without impacting their current utilization patterns (true low hanging fruit).
“Second,” he went on, “I spoke of
the governance model that has enabled
this voluntary standard to scale. Rather
than a single institution declaring such a
policy be implemented – with the associated costs of likely a bloated IT acquisition – we pursued a version of former
President Herbert Hoover’s vision of an
‘Associative State’ that emphasized government’s role as ‘convener’ rather than
regulator, or direct investor. One phone
call from me to PG&E’s CIO, Karen
Austin, kicked off a series of voluntary
collaborations that have since resulted
in commitments by utilities serving 60
million households (over 100 million
people) to adopt the Green Button data
standard.
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