Preventing regional power blackouts, improving demand-side energy management, offering new customized pricing options, helping the environment—all these benefits were the subject of smart grid presentations at the recent CEE June Program Meeting. CEE, along with technology partner EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), has been keeping tabs on the development of smart grid standards development and smart grid implementation pilot projects across the CEE membership.
Smart grid, essentially, is a whole new interactive way of approaching energy distribution and management, from transmission networks to home energy use scheduling, including "smart" communication among appliances, computers, electric meters, consumers, and utilities.
The concept involves advanced metering infrastructure; secure, instantaneous utility-to-home and in-home information sharing; automated, state-of-the-art controls for thermostats, appliances, and other technologies; and fast, more easily targeted responses to outages, emergencies, repairs, and even routine service start-ups or disconnects, anywhere on the grid or distribution network, even in remote areas.
In technical terms, it's the integration of two-way data communications with electricity transmission, allowing for a number of promising new energy efficiency and environmental benefits, most notably more efficient management of fluctuating supply and demand conditions, and ultimately a smaller carbon footprint.
At the June CEE Program Meeting, Omar Siddiqui of EPRI gave an overview of the subject, noting that EPRI is under contract to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to develop the roadmap that will bring the smart grid to fruition. Right now, he admitted, it seems like a "bumpy road," because of all the different definitions of smart grid, and the many diverse products, applications, technical standards, protocols, communications considerations, and stakeholders. As the utility industry gears up to prepare for the changeover to smart grid technology, he quipped, the gap between "hype and reality" has led to a "peak of inflated expectations." Yet, he said, the benefits are worth waiting for: better customer service, operational efficiency, improved demand response control, and more finely-tuned signals to customers regarding their energy use behavior.
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Larry Oliva of Southern California Edison called smart grid a "journey, not a destination," predicting that the entire process of transitioning to the new grid infrastructure could take as long as 20 years. Short term, he said, there's at least another 13 months of work ahead to achieve some local capability.
Oliva also reported that there are currently six pieces of legislation at the state level in California and fifteen at the U.S. federal level, all attempting to fit pieces of the puzzle together. Making sense of all this activity has been a challenge.
In the end, he said, we can look forward to better integration of resources, more effective management of the energy industry workforce, an "active" participation by customers in the energy supply picture, and new options for pricing and electricity use—even the flexibility of ordering specific amounts of electricity, rather than being locked in to the traditional open-ended "unlimited" plan most utility customers now use.
When it comes to the environment, Oliva says, we could expect a CO2 reduction of up to 1,000 tons a day when smart grid systems are in place. In terms of energy reduction, Oliva explained that a very conservative estimate would be 1 percent electricity reduction when customers are given better facts and figures about applications, time-of-day rates. With this information, the supposition is that customers are able to make intelligent decisions regarding their own personal power use and scheduling.
The presentations at the June Program Meeting were just the beginning of the conversation about smart grid at CEE. As more members begin implementations of smart grid projects over the coming years, CEE will seek to provide an ongoing forum for discussing the implications of smart grid developments on efficiency program efforts.
For more information on the Southern California Edison SmartConnect program, contact: Larry Oliva at Lawrence.Oliva at sce.com or (626) 633-3410. For more information on CEE’s burgeoning work in smart grid, contact Rebecca Foster at rfoster at cee1.org or (617) 337-9265. |
