Posts Tagged ‘Andreas Berthold-van der Molen’
Interview with Andreas Berthold-van der Molen at Microsoft EMEA
Andreas Berthold-van der Molen is responsible for Utilities at Microsoft EMEA which operates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Microsoft helps their customers in the utilities to optimize their environments.
Andreas was invited as a speaker to the Smart Metering Conference in Copenhagen and Microsoft’s approach was to highlight how we can change consumer behavior by helping them to adapt to new technology. The feedback from the project with Yello Strom was that it’s nice for consumers to have a dashboard that shows the consumption in real-time but after a week or two the interest decreases.
The research made by Microsoft shows that if we can help consumers to increase their living comfort, e.g. by controlling their heating or cooling, we can change the consumer behavior as well.
Together with partners Microsoft offers end-to-end solutions based on technological possibilities that will increase the living comfort and also gives the consumers the ability to control the consumption from a distance.
In the smart grid, Microsoft’s focus is to connect and build bridges between existing applications so that they can talk to each other. If the utilities integrate existing assets, they will be able to solve a lot of ongoing challenges.
Microsoft also supports partners to create solutions for the whole utility value chain from generation, transmission and distribution to the retailers.
Andreas explains that by attending to conferences like the Smart Metering 2010 Scandinavia he has the possibility to talk to a lot of vendors and utilities from different countries during the breaks between the sessions. It is very time efficient to have dialogs in a very short timeframe.
For more information about Microsoft EMEA Utility activities, please visit
www.microsoft.com/utilities
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krPrS12Bmyc