Smart Grid Blog

America’s energy needs face several paradigm shifts. To help meet projected growth in the demand for electricity while at the same time doing the least harm to the environment on the power production and consumption sides, smart grid technology will play an important role for a number of reasons:

• It will bring greater security and stability for transmission and distribution operators
• It can integrate intermittent — but very clean — sources of electricity, such as wind and solar into our power grid
• It will allow for “Smart Buildings” to go online for greater efficiency and lower costs
• It enables customers who are both consumers and producers of electricity to give back to the grid.

via Smart Grid – Coming to a Town Near You.

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.