The words “self healing grid” are an instant lure, but grid experts would be happier if we stopped throwing the term around. What actually happens is lighter on the magic, heavier on the helpful.
blackouts
NanoMarkets, a Virginia-based industry analyst firm, claims that new smart grid infrastructure projects will generate significant new opportunities for sensor manufacturers.
According to the report, “Sensors for the Smart Grid: Market Opportunities 2010-2017,” building the new smart grid infrastructure will generate $11.4 billion revenue for sensors and related products.
via Smart Grid.
The ultimate smart city, then, will allow utility companies–like Xcel Energy ( XEL – news – people ) in Boulder–to better manage power, to automatically prevent and repair service outages. Imagine a summer without blackouts, or a winter when downed power lines can be repaired in half the time. No more calling 611 to report an outage–they’ll already be rolling the truck.
The recent Rochester City Council authorization of repairs to a generator in the RPU fleet is obviously necessary, but it points out the major problem that the electric infrastructure in this county faces.
It is using technology that would have been recognized by Thomas Edison. The current grid is not a system but simply a group of individual lines, linked in some instances and not in others, that basically is dependent on something going wrong before the operators realize there is a problem.
California’s push to lead U.S. sales of electric cars may result in higher power rates for consumers in the state, as a growing number of rechargeable vehicles forces utilities to pay for grid upgrades.
The autos’ effect on electricity fees is being reviewed by California’s Public Utilities Commission this month as the most populous U.S. state will require Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Co., Honda Motor Co., Ford Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. to sell more plug-in vehicles from late 2011.
Power companies including Southern California Edison, the state’s largest, have to install new transformers and meters to handle greater demand and prevent blackouts when autos are being charged at outlets. Utility rates will rise to cover the costs, said Travis Miller, a Morningstar Inc. analyst in Chicago.
via California electric-cars push may raise power costs – Finance and Commerce.
New information technologies make it possible to put in place a “smart grid” capable of two-way communication and many more functions to control supply and demand.
A smart grid can help prevent black-outs, give consumers up-to-the-minute information on electricity usage and prepare the way for increased use of clean, renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar power. “Even as our economy has been transformed by new forms of technology, our electric grid looks largely the same as it did half a century ago,” said President Barack Obama during a March 19, 2009 visit to an electric car factory in Orange County, California.
Today’s power grid in America is a relic of the 20th Century. The idea behind smart grid is to inject a two-way information layer into the electricity distribution process. Smart grid components include advanced home meters, new grid management techniques and software. At the home or business, smart grid can aid conservation by showing customers their power usage and offering real-time choices about when they use electricity. Scaling up, smart grids allow utility managers to constrain peak load requirements through a combination of consumer incentives and accurate diagnosis of demand. Ultimately, smart grid technologies can open the door for more plug-in electric cars and vehicles. Added together, the impact of smart grid may help craft an environmentally-sustainable way of the life for the 21st Century.
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The Long Island Power Authority on Friday said it has applied to the U.S. Department of Energy for $119 million in stimulus funds it intends to use to support various smart grid projects.
LIPA has said before it wants to increase its smart grid platform, technology that links digital communications infrastructure with power delivery. Smart grids have to ability to do things like monitor energy on a house-by-house basis as well as remotely control output as a way to reduce energy consumption, resulting in lower emissions. Smart grids also make it easier to add alternative energy projects like wind power to the power grid.
LIPA said it has asked the DOE for $49.6 million to support a Dynamic Reactive Support System Project, a voltage manager that has the ability to reduce blackouts, and $69.5 million to build LIPA Smart Grid Communications Backbone, a fiber-optic network.
The $119 million will not cover LIPA’s plans to develop a Smart Grid Corridor Project on Route 110 in Melville. That project, developed with partners Stony Brook University and Farmingdale State College, would create a central campus to focus on marrying smart grid technology with alternative energy. LIPA will file a separate application later this month for stimulus dollars to support that project.
Separately, Long Island Power Authority chief executive Kevin Law was just appointed chairman of the Stony Brook Council, an advisory board for Stony Brook University. Law, a Stony Brook alum, was appointed to the post by Gov. David Paterson.
via The Technofile » LIPA asks for $119 million in stimulus dollars.
Utilities’ next-gen networks are not just for bright sparks.
Electricity. It’s everywhere around us, powers the machines that run our society and yet we seldom think more about it than the effort it takes to flick a switch.
But a nationwide project underway to lift the IQ of our dumb power grid to make our homes and workplaces better able to manage the power they consume is poised to sweep away that complacency.
And it offers a broad swathe of opportunities for IT resellers to find new markets, energy insiders say.
In the biggest change to power generation, distribution and use since Nikola Tesla was a boy gazing up at lightning storms in the night sky, Australia’s electricity companies and governments are rolling out smart networks to replace those powering the nation for the past century.
The most obvious change most will see is attached to the wall of their premises. At a cost of $2.8 billion to $4.6 billion about 10 million humble, electromechanical power meters with patent histories harking to 1872 will be replaced by smart meters loaded with scores of features and potential to reduce and provide usage information. The new meters are $150-$250 each.
They report to energy companies on how power is consumed, are disconnected and reconnected remotely and promise to connect wirelessly to devices inside the house to manage loads. And they may be controlled remotely, for instance, to lower the air-conditioning on a hot day or schedule energy-guzzling white goods such as fridges to defrost or clothes dryers to operate at night when the load on the network is light and the cost lower.
But this advanced meter infrastructure and its $4.8 billion to $7.5 billion savings is only the visible component. Distributors are installing thousands of sensors at substations and on Australia’s streets to alert them to events that could harm the grid. And the pay day for resellers, power industry insiders say, is to bring IT smarts to the back offices of energy companies so they can secure and make sense of the welter of data about to come their way.
When all the pieces are in pace some time around the end of next decade, Australia will have a smart grid that intelligently routes electricity in the most efficient way and heals itself when disaster strikes.
Water suppliers are keen observers, so impressed are they by promises of reduced emissions and operating costs. Waiting for a blackout or a burst water main to identify flaws in our ageing utilities networks may one day be a dim memory.
via Electrifying ideas for a smart power grid – Networking – Technology – News – CRN Australia.
State regulators on Friday will review a $385 million plan for Con Edison to use new grid technology to streamline electricity flow and avert crippling blackouts.
Consumers would pay almost half – about $176 million – a one-time hike added to bills over three years that averages $57 per customer. The tab will vary depending on usage. Big businesses, like a Wall St. brokerage, might pay more, while residents would pay less, Con Ed officials said.
Under proposals before the state Public Service Commission, sensors and other devices would be placed throughout the 94,000 miles of Con Ed’s network to continuously update a central computer on power use and possible breakdowns.
“We’ll get advance knowledge of equipment failure in a particular area and be able to reroute electricity around that area to prevent a loss of power,” said Aubrey Braz, a Con Ed vice president in charge of smart grid technology.
The likelihood of large feeder cables burning out during peak demand on hot summer days – incidents that triggered the Washington Heights blackout of 1999 and the Long Island City blackout of 2006 – would be minimized with the automated system, he said.
via Con Ed proposes new technology to monitor flow, avoid blackouts – for $385M.
The Department of Energy has decreed that Smart Grids must facilitate: Self-healing from power disturbance events ; Enabling active participation by consumers in demand response; Operating resiliently against physical and cyber attack; Providing power quality for 21st century needs; Accommodating all generation and storage options; Enabling new products, services, and markets; and, Optimizing assets and operating efficiently.
It is eventually anticipated that “Smart Grids” will migrate towards and become a part of the recently found expression, ‘The Internet of Things,’ which envisages that all devices and objects all over the world will eventually be connected together by an Internet Network. This system even includes books, cans and, well, anything and everything, and allows, for example, a person setting out for home from work to remotely activate water heating to have a warm, low carbon footprint bath on arrival and can even request a home aid robot to prepare a snack of sorts. The Internet of Things sees every individual being surrounded by at least 1,000 to 5,000 ‘connected’ objects, and the Internet itself should be able to encode and track 50 to 100,000 billion objects simultaneously.
Another catch word that somewhat applies to this scenario is ‘Hyperconnectivity,’ which according to Nortel (News – Alert), is achieved when the number of connectivity resources such as devices, nodes, and applications actually connected to the network outnumbers the consumers who use the network. The devices are as varied as PC’s, PDA’s, cell phones, iPods, cameras, sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, cars, appliances, medical equipment, industrial machinery, and even irrigation equipment on farmlands.
On Feb. 26, 2008, a short circuit in a Miami electric power substation and an operator’s error gave managers of the nation’s electrical grids a glimpse of an uneasy future. The events triggered a chain reaction of power plant and transmission line outages in the state, unleashing sharp swings in voltages and power frequency that blacked out power for nearly 1 million customers in southern and central Florida for up to four hours.
A stunning consequence of the outage was the lightning-like spread of destabilizing power frequencies throughout the eastern United States and southern Canada in the space of six seconds. Then, fortunately, the grid managed to settle itself without a much bigger blackout.
This and similar threats to the stability of the nation’s power supply might go undetected until too late but for the development of monitoring systems that can provide snapshots of the grid’s changing conditions in each fraction of a second. Experts say this emerging capability will play a vital role in the next big evolution of the nation’s power transmission system: equipping it to handle a rising flow of wind and solar power that is central to the nation’s climate policy.
A video depicting the Florida incident’s rippling spread has been created by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s electrical and computer engineering department, which caught the disturbance on its first-generation grid frequency monitoring network. Some grid executives have downloaded the video on their laptops as a kind of horror flick for engineers of what could happen.
Power companies and grid managers are developing an advanced monitoring system across the United States and Canada, using what are called synchrophasor units to gather, analyze and distribute data on grid conditions. About 150 of the units have been deployed, and the industry has created the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative — supported by the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) — to expand the technology. DOE is offering grants totaling $615 million for smart grid demonstration projects, including synchrophasors, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
via Devices emerge to handle the quirks of adding more renewable energy to the grid – NYTimes.com.
