Smart Grid Blog

The U.S. electrical grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses. The National Academy of Engineering ranks it as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. What it cannot do is support the massive shift to low-carbon power that scientists warn will be needed to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts.

via U.S. Electrical Grid Undergoes Massive Transition to Connect to Renewables: Scientific American.

Me, I always thought grids and electricity were two pretty smart inventions, particularly the American electricity grid – 99.97 percent reliable. Hard to beat that. But as it turns out, maybe that can get even smarter.

Businesses lose $80 – $150 billion due to outages and power quality yearly according to industry observer Tom Cross (News – Alert). Not smart. Especially when, according to Cross, “the totle annual revenues for electrical power are approximately $330 billion,” and “the cost to build a smart grid is estimated to cost $160 billion.”

via Smart Grid.

The U.S. Department of Energy has been generous in its support of smart grid efforts this year, granting $3.4 billion to utilities to transition to a cleaner, more efficient electrical grid, and backing companies of all sizes making components and energy management systems to change the way Americans use power. Today it is zeroing in on the transmission piece, announcing $60 million in stimulus funds for upgrading the country’s three major transmission grids.

via Dept. of Energy beefs up electricity transmission with new $60M | VentureBeat.

With fanfare and news releases in both Washingtons, the Obama Administration on Tuesday announced it will invest $88.8 million worth of federal stimulus money in this state to develop “smart grid” technologies to use electricity more efficiently and cut customers' power bills.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., described it as an effort to “infuse intelligence into our electrical grid” at a time when the Northwest's power transmission system “is starting to show its age.”

via Washington state will get big chunk of “smart grid” money.

In the quest to supply electricity for millions of future electric cars, engineers have stumbled upon the most unlikely of energy prospects — the car itself.

If that sounds like a bit of tangled logic to you, then you’re not alone. The very idea leaves most intelligent people scratching their heads.

Still, the concept is being examined by auto companies, utilities, universities and industry consultants. And many believe the electric car battery could turn out to be one of the most important sources of current for … well, the electric car battery.

via Could Car Batteries Back up Our Electrical Grid? – 2009-11-09 09:36:02 EST | Design News.

According a new report, a radical overhaul of policy and technology is needed for the USA to reap the benefits promised by the smart grid. Sean Ottewell reports.

The oversight policy of the US electrical grid has been described as a hodge podge in a new report published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Industrial Performance Centre. In its report Electricity Transmission Policy for America: Enabling a Smart Grid, End-to-End, the Centre calls on the federal government to develop a coherent national policy on transmission upgrades and standards for the smart grid, and on the electricity to industry to develop a secure and sustainable approach to providing electric power (Fig.1).

The report stresses the importance of creating nationwide smart grid standards, backed up by legislation that clarifies that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has high voltage transmission planning authority over transmission owners, operators, developers as well as related local, state and federal agencies. FERC should also be empowered to set clear timelines for completing transmission planning, review, modification, and approval, it says.

via Advanced Automation Needed To Achieve Smart Grid Success – Engineer Live, For Engineers, By Engineers.

The smart grid — the plan to revamp the U.S. electrical grid into a more efficient and optimized system for managing and delivering power — is also a key opportunity on which Cisco aims to capitalize. Cisco has previously stated that it sees billions of dollars of opportunity in helping to provide smart grid technology for utilities and others.

During Cisco’s most recent quarter, the company rolled out its Smart Connected Buildings technology. It’s a strategy that involves connecting building systems together so they can be controlled and managed for power utilization and efficiency.

“Cisco will lead in defining the end-to-end architecture that will enable our vision of securely managing energy on electrical grids all the way from the generation to consumption in homes and buildings,” Chambers said.

via Cisco: Small Business, Smart Grid to Drive Growth – InternetNews.com.

For millions of New Jersey residents, solar power is coming soon to their neighborhoods – even to the utility poles in their backyards.

In a move both bold and expensive, state regulators yesterday approved a plan for Public Service Electric & Gas Co., the state’s largest utility, to install solar panels on 200,000 utility poles in its service territory.

The project will make New Jersey the nation’s second-most solar-fueled state, according to the state Board of Public Utilities, trailing only California.

PSE&G will spend $515 million to install 80 megawatts of solar power through the end of 2013, doubling the state’s solar capacity. Half the new production will be derived from individual solar modules mounted on about a quarter of PSE&G’s 900,000 utility poles.

The other 40 megawatts of production will be generated by centralized solar arrays, including one at PSE&G’s Cox’s Corner Switching Station in Evesham Township, Burlington County.

The 80-megawatt PSE&G project amounts to a tenth of the nation’s current total grid-connected photovoltaic capacity, according to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

“We think it’s a good program to get solar started in the state,” said Stefanie Brand, director of the N.J. Division of Rate Counsel, the state’s consumer advocate. Her office supported PSE&G’s proposal, which she said had a “very minor impact” on rates – adding about 10 cents per month for a residential customer in the first year, a 0.13 percent increase.

But the PSE&G project still amounts to only about 4.4 percent of the ambitious goal the state has set for power generated from renewable energy sources by 2020.

Unlike most solar projects, which supply individual customers with electricity, the PSE&G plan has attracted attention because its panels will feed directly into the electrical grid. PSE&G is calling the project “Solar 4 All” to drive home the point that all customers will benefit from solar, not just those who can afford to mount the heavily subsidized panels on their rooftops.

via PSE&G plan takes solar energy public | Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/30/2009.

The computer in my toaster might be more powerful than the one that guided Apollo 11. But half a century after Robert Noyce launched the cyber age by inventing the silicon-based integrated circuit, computers are curiously scarce in one huge and critical part of daily life.

When power goes out in your neighborhood, Baltimore Gas & Electric has no idea until somebody picks up a phone and tells it. BGE still has to send out meter readers to figure out bills.

Households are clueless about daily electricity price fluctuations. It’s like not knowing when strawberries are on sale at Safeway.

What does it cost to run a load of dishes? Bake a turkey? Watch I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here? Unless you’re a power geek, you don’t know.

BGE’s ambitious “smart meter” program promises to bring the electrical grid up to the technology standards we expect from bank accounts, cell phones and coffee makers.

Done right, it would deliver amazing efficiencies, cutting the use of expensive, peak-use power, reducing pollution, increasing reliability and lowering long-term costs after a modest initial investment.

After a decade of deregulation that turned out to be a payday for electricity sellers and a disaster for consumers, smart meters might give the little guy a chance to fight back.

I’ll give possible reasons why BGE and parent Constellation Energy proposed a program that seems against their interests. But first let’s look at the big picture.

No market works without good information passing between buyers and sellers about the value of what’s exchanged. To take an extreme case, the old Soviet Union collapsed partly because prices set by central planners bore zero relationship to reality, causing shortages, resource misallocation and inefficiency.

via BGE ‘smart meter’ program plugs users into 21st century – baltimoresun.com.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) once again opened up its stimulus fund war chest yesterday, awarding over $57m to eight smart grid demonstration projects across the country.

The new investment, which follows $17m of government smart grid funding awarded last year, will aim to accelerate the roll out of projects designed to demonstrate the feasibility of smart grid technologies capable of managing and reducing energy use across the grid.

“Modernising our electrical grid to make it stronger, smarter, more efficient and more secure is a crucial step in expanding renewable energy and creating jobs,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “These investments will help lay the foundation for American leadership in the clean energy economy.”

Grid technology specialist American Superconductor Corporation was the big winner, securing over $12m in backing for two projects focused on restricting power surges and improving the reliability of power cables.

Meanwhile, Zenergy Power Inc received over $8m in funding towards the development of a different technology for restricting power surges and Edison received over $5m to help fund a trial of demand response technologies in New York.

Awards of between $4m and $6m were also distributed to a range of university and city government-backed projects designed to enhance the resilience of local grids, help reduce end-user energy demands, and improve the management of energy fed into the grid from distributed sources, such as solar panels and small scale wind turbines.

via US government pumps $57m into smart grid – 21 Jul 2009 – BusinessGreen.com.

With the likely passage of the “Cap and Trade” bill, many investors are jumping on the renewable energy bandwagon. And why not. With the government about to mandate a cap-and-trade program that will drive up the cost of electricity, there are many new opportunities to capitalize on the flow of investment dollars from public and private sources. They also are looking for investment opportunities through stocks of smart grid companies.

This head long push into alternative power generation is causing investors to take a new look at the old electrical grid system. While there have been attempts to move to a market based power generation system, most of these efforts have failed to achieve their original goals. Moreover, the electricity transmission and distribution system remains much the same and is a big problem. For example, T. Boone Pickens has announced he is curtailing his plans to build the world’s largest wind farm in West Texas. Part of the reason is the lack of adequate transmission lines to carry electricity from the remote wind sites to cities. This is where a smart grid investment program makes sense for investors.

Investing in the Smart Grid

This old electrical grid system is designed to distribute power from consistent generation facilities that are close by. Building large wind farms in West Texas requires a way to move that power to urban areas that need it. Moreover, what happens if the wind stops blowing during the hottest days of the summer? Our current electrical grid system is ill suited to handle the variability of new sources of electrical power. Solving the transition to new power sources is only half the battle. After generating the power, you need to distribute it to where it is needed at the right time, in the right amounts and at a lower cost.

via Smart Grid Investing – Hans Wagner — Seeking Alpha.

Because today’s energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies lack connective infrastructure, they provide only first steps toward climate change mitigation.

Quantitatively they only make dents. This applies to building efficiency methods, such as improved lighting and insulation, and transportation efficiency methods such as higher fuel economy standards. The same for onshore wind and concentrated solar thermal, the first (after hydro) competitively-priced renewable technologies. In almost all cases, they lack integration with long distance or even local distribution systems to reach their markets.

These limitations are the main reasons a “smart” electrical grid, empowered by $4.5 billion in federal stimulus funds, is starting to graduate from R&D into products and services.

It’s not an easy transition, though, as it surfaces large technology challenges as well as the positions of competing business sectors, technologies, and interests, and the less Machiavellian problems of industries that are working together for the first time. Splashing around now in one pool are the electrical utility, energy feedstock, information technology, building design and management, transportation, and electrical devices and appliances sectors.

With so much taxpayer money involved, President Obama’s energy team is mandating up-front standards to ensure that what is built by these disparate forces works and is efficient.

The initial results illustrate the technology and business challenges, but also, a culture of innovation and the experience in business and industrial reinventions of the IT sector.

Driven by these conflicting agendas, and perhaps by IT’s preferring to move fast, competing models of the smart grid are emerging. In one, the smart grid grows out from the center, conquering a transmission and distribution infrastructure comprised of 3200 utilities and over fifty regulatory bodies. In the other, it grows in from the edges: that is, from innovations in building energy efficiencies and in newly-emerging “microgrids” that are loosely coupled to the grid.

via Smart Grid: Digging The Foundations | SolveClimate.com.