An Energetic Woman: Joan Gamble

By Cindy Ellen Hill

Joan Gamble loves her job. For the last 30 years, she has carved a lucrative, win-win career out of helping customers manage their electricity use more efficiently, lowering not only their own electric bills but also helping the utility’s bottom line and benefitting the environment in the process.

Now, as Vice President for Strategic Change and Business Services of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation (CVPS), Vermont’s largest electric company, Gamble is focusing on the next major shift in electric utility management: bringing the newest generation of communication technology to utility customers so they can be better informed, and make better choices, about their energy use.

Growing up in Delaware in the environmentally conscious 1970s, Gamble became intrigued by the notion of energy conservation as a means of avoiding building additional power plants. She graduated in 1980 from Wesleyan, “a little liberal arts college in Connecticut where you can design your own major,” having created a degree program in environmental studies and energy issues. She moved to the Pacific Northwest, where her brother lived, drawn by the fact that Oregon and Washington State were at that time hotbeds of progressive energy and environmental programs. She hooked up with a job at a consulting firm engaged in integrative resource management. After just a few years, she left private consulting to work for a utility.

“I was doing this consulting work, giving utilities advice on the steps to take to promote energy conservation, but then not able to see through the implementation,” Gamble recalls. “I thought it would be nice to go to work for a utility and actually carry out some of these programs. So I went to work for a utility, now called Puget Energy, and was there about five years. Then I was recruited by CVPS, looking for someone with experience in efficiency, or as they call it, ‘demand-side management experience.’”

Gamble had very little connection with Vermont before the head-hunting phone call came in 1989, but she barely hesitated before making the move. “I had been to Vermont a few times skiing and thought it was a really romantic environment,” she says. “I love outdoor activity – I’m outdoors every season of the year, and having a job in a place that is so beautiful was just an incredible thought.”

Gamble entered CVPS in the field of marketing and research, in charge of determining how to best design and run consumer energy efficiency programs. “At the time I arrived, we were negotiating how we should deliver efficiency program services with the Conservation Law Foundation and the regulators. We were running a $20 million a year budget for efficiency programming,” she says. “Then the state formed a separate entity for efficiency programs, Efficiency Vermont, so that all of Vermont’s utilities and [their] consumers, including those who were smaller and could not fund these programs on their own, could access efficiency programming.”

Thanks to the state’s utilities and the work of Efficiency Vermont, along with the Vermont culture which values conservation, “Vermont is one of the few places where over the years, per-consumer electricity consumption has remained flat or even gone down some,” Gamble says. In most areas of the country, the explosion of plug-in gadgets and ever-increasing wave of home appliances, along with drastically increasing average home sizes, means that per-consumer electrical consumption has gone up.

With the lion’s share of energy efficiency programs transferred to Efficiency Vermont, Gamble’s career focus shifted to industry deregulation and the structure of the CVPS corporation, and her career title morphed from marketing to strategic planning and human resources.

“In the mid-1990s, the whole industry was looking at deregulation, where utilities would provide the wires and poles and then the consumer would choose where to buy your kilowatt hours from,” Gamble explains, noting that the idea is akin to the phone system, where you can choose your long-distance provider. “Some New England states and California and a few others went to deregulation, but then Enron happened and the rest of the states froze and did not make the change. Ultimately Vermont never made the switch to deregulation, but I was involved in talking to the state about what that might look like if we did deregulate, and internally, CVPS had to look at what we would look like if there was deregulation.”

That internal evaluation led to a realization that the utility had to change its structure, which had served prior needs but was now looking bloated in the new economic environment. “At the time, we had about 800 employees, and we realized that we really did not need that many,” Gamble recalls. “So there was a transformation through a bunch of early retirement packages that were offered and so on. We reduced the workforce to 520, and we’ve remained there since then.”

Today, Gamble’s career has come full circle, back to consumer outreach designed to help electric-utility customers better understand their energy usage so they can make wise efficiency choices. But while 20^th century conservation efforts might have sounded a little cold and dark – turn down the heat, turn off the lights – this next step in electric utility service is all about a bright, shiny future.

“With the launch of Smart Power, customers will have a lot more choices regarding their electric service options,” Gamble says.

Smart Power is CVPS’s trademarked name for their local program under the national Smart Grid project of the U.S. Department of Energy. “Different utilities around the state of Vermont will receive over $60 million from the federal government for this program, but for every dollar the state entities get, they have to match and spend that amount. So Vermont utilities will be spending around $120 million on this program. CVPS is getting $32 million of the federal money slated for Vermont, so will be spending about $64 million on it,” Gamble explains.

The biggest chunk of that money will go to Smart Meters, which will replace present home electric meters around Vermont between November 2011 and January 2013. Smart Meters collect usage data every 15 minutes and transmit it back to the utility. Customers can look online and watch their real-time electrical usage in 15 minute intervals, or look at their usage trends over time to figure out where their electrical-bill dollars are going.

This information gives consumers an incentive to watch their general energy conservation in their homes. Seeing how much electricity your house is drawing at night when you’re asleep, for example, might well be the nudge needed to unplug all those instant-on gadgets which draw power even when you’re not using them.

The information also helps consumers choose between any of a growing number of time-based rate plans. Like the old hard-wired Rate 11 plan which many Vermont customers still operate under, in which your hot water heater and electric baseboards were tied to a circuit breaker that shut them off during expensive peak electric rate times, the new time-of-day rate plans will allow customers to move their high-demand electrical usage – dryers, for example – to cheaper, off-peak times.

“For anyone considering, say, a plug-in electric vehicle, they are going to want to be on a time-of-use rate plan and consider the time of use when they plug that vehicle in to charge up,” Gamble points out.

“We will also have a communications chip in there called ZigBee that can talk to appliances in the home. For example, we will be offering an in-home display to consumers who adopt a new time-of-use rate plan, so they can see right there on the wall their real-time electrical usage. GE is also already advertising appliances that can communicate with this chip, so through the electrical meter you can program your appliances to not come on during peak rate times.”

The Smart Power technology will also help CVPS deal with power outages more efficiently. “Right now, for example, when there’s a power outage, we only know it when a customer calls,” Gamble says. “Now we can ask our meters, ‘Are you still there?’ We will know where the outages are and be able to pinpoint the cause. And we may be able to reroute power to many customers who are out.

“It doesn’t mean all power outages are over,” she continues, “but let’s say a tree goes down on some lines, and 100 homes are out of power. There may be a way to route power in a different way so perhaps 50 of those homes have the power back on swiftly. And after we get the tree off the lines and restore power, we can again ping the meters and make sure everyone’s on, and that there isn’t a second tree down around the corner that we were unaware of.”

CVPS is also looking at how to use the new technology to best apprise customers of the high-cost, peak energy days during the summer, which are not always predictable ahead of time. It’s a question the federal Department of Energy is also interested in, Gamble says.

Though Vermont doesn’t use as much air-conditioning as most other areas, it does have a growing interest in solar power. Solar arrays, such as the demonstration facility at CVPS’s headquarters on Route 7 in Rutland, generate the most electricity on those hot, sunny summer days when the peak demand is highest and the grid approaches maximum capacity.

Marketing focus groups have found a mix of consumer responses to the new Smart Power technologies. There is a small group of very excited, technologically-oriented consumers who can’t wait to try it out, but the majority are “cautiously optimistic,” Gamble says. “They are wondering if it is going to cost more. And in our case, it will be a very, very small rate increase in the short term, less than 1 percent. But rates will hold lower for a long time, and each consumer will now have the information to reduce their bills by having real-time information about their usage and time-of-day rate plan options.”

The third group of customers CVPS’s marketing research identified, also small, is very worried about the changes – particularly about privacy issues relating to monitoring their electrical use and whether that information will be shared with other companies.

“A lot of energy information companies will be asking for the consumer’s energy consumption use information in order to advise them or market to them products that help reduce their energy bills,” Gamble says. “But that will be up to the consumer whether they provide that information. We will not be sharing customers’ individual use data with other companies. So we have work to do to reassure these customers and make sure that we understand and acknowledge their privacy concerns.”

More information on Smart Power can be found at www.cvps.com