Nov 04 2009

Smart Grid: The View from North America

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

With billions of dollars now flowing into the "smart grid" market--from utilities, venture capitalist and now the Department of Energy--it's no wonder more than 400 people showed up today for a conference at PG&E on "The Networked Grid."

Organized by GreenTechMedia, noted for its reporting and market research on clean technology, the conference is covering current and planned utility deployments of smart grid technology, communications infrastructure, home area networks and the challenges of integrating renewable and distributed energy on a mass scale.

Rick Thompson, co-founder and COO of GreenTechMedia, kicked off the conference with preliminary findings of a new survey of North American utilities, which confirm the high level of ferment in the smart grid market.

Over half of utilities surveyed are now in the preliminary stages of planning or running pilots for smart grid applications; about half expect to deploy smart meters to a majority of their customers in the next three years; half plan to run pilot tests of charging electric vehicles over the next couple of years; and half plan to deploy utility-scale energy storage on their grids within five years.

The biggest benefit they see from smart grid is reduction in peak demand, which will limit the need for new power generation investments. Other leading benefits include energy efficiency (good for the environment and the pocketbook) and reduced outages.

The biggest challenges they see are regulatory barriers and the lack of technology standards, which are needed to ensure that equipment from various manufacturers will work together on the same grid.

Another major challenge is ensuring the security of utility communications networks that relay customer data or control grid operations. "We need intelligent security," said Erfan Ibrahim, a senior technologist at the Electric Power Research Institute. "Just building a big wall won't keep (intruders) out."

GreenTechMedia's Thompson said the single biggest concern of utilities is the challenge of managing, storing, protecting and effectively using the vast amount of data that smart grids will generate. Utilities, including PG&E, may need to dedicate entire datacenters just to andling and processing the hourly meter reads from smart meters, which replace the monthly reads of old.

Andrew Campbell, advisor to CPUC commissioner Rachelle Chong, noted that the regulatory body adopted a policy in 2003 that all electric customers should have smart meters. The commission's goal--well on its way to implementation--was to permit the introduction of time-varying pricing to induce customers to shift demand away from peak periods.

But as PG&E's Kevin Dasso noted, the many new capabilities of smart meters will require changing the traditional relationship between utilities and their customers. "We need to work with customers to help them take advantage of the meters' capabilities. . . .  We have to make sure we are communicating with our customers . . . to help them make the transition to what smart grid can offer them."

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