Will Consumers Ever Want to 'Hug the Stuffing' out of the Smart Grid?

Like most people around the world, I find myself still thinking about those Chilean miners, more than a week after the rescue seen around the world.

I was at home in bed watching a live video feed as the capsule carrying the first rescue worker reached the bottom of the mine. The miners couldn’t wait to touch him, to hug him, to reach out to him, and the worker was visibly emotionally touched by their physical reactions to him.

It was an almost child-like reaction those miners had, wanting to make sure the rescue worker was real. It’s the same reaction we have when we’re confronted with something or someone that seems mythical. We want to touch it, to touch her. We want to see if it’s imaginary, and, when it is proven real, we want to embrace it and, as my mother would say, “just hug the stuffing out of it” because we’re so happy it exists.

I thought the miners were going to hug the stuffing out of that poor rescue worker, but, I honestly don’t think he would have minded. That moment where myth became flesh was too amazing to worry about one’s stuffing, really.

In the end, mythology was trumped by reality---after two months of those miners thinking the outside world atop their heads was unreachable, unthinkable, mythological, it became real again.

Mythology is a part of all human culture. We tell stories of great feats, and, if we can’t explain them scientifically, or if we have a large emotional reaction that such things can’t be reality, we tend to bloom them into myths.

The smart grid is no exception. It has its own mythology, especially to the average electric consumer hearing all sorts of horror stories about higher bills and problematic smart meters. The real issue with mythology is that it does not always feed on fact. It can feed equally on emotions, whether positive ones like the hope those miners had of returning to the surface, or negative ones like turmoil, chaos and fear.

With customers today, the smart grid mythology is a negative one and is, unfortunately, based on fear---fear of the unknown. While, as an industry, we seem collectively flabbergasted at the large number of negative stories on the smart grid that have been published in recent months, we have to realize the emotional distance between those of us “in the know” with smart grid technology and all those customers still in the dark.

We are on the surface, and, figuratively, those customers are in a mine, and what exists between the two camps are layers and layers of sedimentary mythology that we must, as an industry, find a way to drill through if we’re going to get those customers to see the smart grid in a positive light.

They need to see it, touch it, find out that it’s real and positive, but we can’t accomplish that by simply telling them it’s positive. You can’t pop a solid myth with pretty words. Unfortunately, mythology is a bit harder to fight and, once established, is much tougher to disperse. We have to accept that negative mythology, whether or not it is based on fact, has been established with customers and the smart grid. And, we have to stop griping about how the average customer just doesn’t understand. You’re right. They don’t.

But, if we don’t find a way to break through that rock-hard mythology, we may find that even the smart grid itself, every digital bit and byte and every physical meter, may fade from fact into mythology, as well. The question is: How do we do to show the positive truth of the smart grid to the average customer so that they want to just hug the stuffing out of it?