Duke Energy, a utility that has 4 million customers across the Midwest and the Carolinas, doesn’t want to be in the business of selling and making consumer electronics. The utility is not interested in helping sell iPhones, selecting the devices that consumers want to use for energy management, or rolling out trucks to neighborhoods to repair gadgets, explained Duke CTO David Mohler at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy conference this morning. Instead Duke is working on getting the smart grid network buildout right, and “opening up the end of the wire to products and new services and letting other players get into interacting around energy with our customers.” In this way, Mohler said, Duke hopes to “let a thousand flowers bloom” at the edge of the network.
via Duke CTO: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom At the Edge of the Smart Grid.
