Recently in the Smart Grid Category
Aug 27 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
Scientists at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, say they have developed a new vehicle biofuel made from Scotch whisky byproducts. The fuel is derived from pot ale liquid from copper stills and spent grains. "While some energy companies are growing crops specifically to generate biofuel, we are investigating excess materials such as whisky byproducts to develop them," Professor Martin Tangey, director of Napier's Biofuel Research Center, told the Financial Times. Tangey says tapping whisky byproducts "is a more environmentally sustainable option and potentially offers new revenue on the back of one of Scotland's biggest industries." Scotch whisky exports were a record $4.85 billion in 2009, or about one quarter of the UK's food and drink exports.
The BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is attracting new remedial clean-up technologies. They include an oil-separating centrifuge system made by Ocean Therapy Solutions, oil-hungry bacteria grown at Tel Aviv University, and an oil-absorbing robot developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The New York Times Green blog reports. The M.I.T. device is a solar-powered nanofiber conveyor belt said to absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil. Using "swarm" robotics, thousands of the devices could form "teams" to attack a spill. M.I.T. plans to enter the invention in an oil clean-up competition from the X-Prize Foundation with a $1 million prize for collecting and recovering spilled oil.
The San Francisco Bay Area is gearing up to install 5,000 car chargers over five years for an expected surge of electric and plug-in hybrid cars like the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and models from Mitsubishi, Toyota, Tesla and other automakers. The nine-county Bay Area currently has about 120 chargers. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has approved a program for organizations to install chargers in the next five years at homes, apartments, office buildings, parking garages, BART stations and shopping malls. "We're trying to address range anxiety," says Damian Breen, director of grant programs for the air quality district. "We want people not to be worried their electric vehicle is going to run out of juice."
Aug 02 2010
It might not help the company win any dates, but PG&E has just been ranked as one of the three most “intelligent” utilities in the
The magazine says it developed the ranking last year “to separate the smart grid hype from reality.” It defines an intelligent utility as one that “applies information to energy, maximizing its reliability, affordability and sustainability from generation to end users.”
The rankings are based on five metrics:
- Productivity (revenue per employee)
- Renewable energy (sales, customers, capacity)
- Smart Grid initiatives (smart meter deployments and smart grid projects)
- Demand response and energy efficiency programs
- IT investment (as a percent of revenue and per employee)
PG&E’s high ranking reflects its record as the North American leader in deploying smart meters, its strong performance in acquiring renewable energy (which accounted for more than 14 percent of electricity sales in 2009), and its long record of commitment to energy efficiency and demand response programs.
The ranking also gives extra credit for companies that report regularly on sustainability and corporate social responsibility—which PG&E just did.
PG&E’s score of 134 represents “very superior intelligence,” according to the UtiliQ ranking.
Kudos to Sempra Energy (San Diego Gas & Electric), which topped the charts with a UtiliQ of 142. That gives them bragging rights for demonstrating “near genius.”
Jul 27 2010
"If you care about addressing the climate issue…or about clean air…or putting the country on a path to energy independence…or about reviving investment and job creation…then you have to be revved up about the electric car," said Chris Johns, president of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) at the outset of today’s Plug-In 2010, an international conference centered on bringing electric vehicles (EVs) to market.
Automakers, electric car component manufacturers, utilities and drivers have converged upon San Jose to discuss all things relevant to electric cars. Industry movers and shakers are sharing information and sizing up the competition before EVs start arriving in American neighborhoods. By the time the conference opens next year, folks owning vehicles like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf should be quietly pulling into their driveways and garages.
Based on the high adoption rate of hybrid vehicles in the last few years, Johns predicted that the Bay Area alone will see somewhere between 220,000 and 845,000 vehicles "plugging in" over the next decade. That’s both exciting news for an electric utility, and a huge responsibility given that a single EV can suck as much power from the grid as three homes in San Francisco.
"At the end of the day, we’re the entity charged with making sure there’s enough clean, affordable power on the grid," Johns said. ". . . And, in our customers’ eyes, we’re responsible for the quality of their experience when they bring that new vehicle home and plug it in for the first time."
PG&E isn’t new to this challenge. The utility has been working to advance clean transportation for the last 20 years or so. The company currently operates the largest utility fleet of clean vehicles in America. It was the first utility to add a Smith all-electric bucket truck to its fleet, will be the first to add Raser Technologies’ all-electric extended range pickup trucks and is awaiting delivery of nearly a dozen Chevy Volts later this year.
For current EV owners, the utility offers a special pricing plan, which gives customers a steep discount in exchange for charging their cars during off-peak hours. Making sure that new owners charge at night will be critical to avoiding the need to build new power plants to meet their demand, Johns noted.
PG&E just began a pilot project with the Electric Power Research Institute that will allow the utility to better understand the infrastructure necessary to support the future of EVs. The program will allow PG&E to examine how long different vehicles take to charge and their impacts on the electric grid at different times of the day.
"The goal is to prove that this works at scale, that it functions seamlessly for the customer and that it’s secure," Johns said. "The pilot is running this year and next year, and we see it as a critical step that can help commercialize the new technologies needed to serve the mass EV market."
As Johns underscored, "there’s an entire ecosystem that has to develop in order to support electric vehicles." And the electric utility, like the gas station of old, is a critical part of it.
Jul 20 2010
On June 24, the California Public Utilities Commission issued guidelines to structure planning and reporting by the state’s investor-owned utilities on their coming deployment of Smart Grid infrastructure.
At PG&E, the guy who gets to develop the utility’s Smart Grid roadmap—a task I for one would much rather talk about than manage—is 29-year PG&E veteran Kevin Dasso. As senior director of electric strategy and regulation, he’s been the company's lead representative with regulatory agencies and policymakers on important issues for the transmission and distribution business, including major new reliability programs. He’s also been quietly co-leading PG&E’s initial Smart Grid planning. Now, to accompany his daunting responsibilities to meet the CPUC’s planning timetables, he gets a formal new title—Senior Director, Smart Grid and Technology Integration, reporting to PG&E's lead Smart Grid officer, Senior Vice President Edward Salas.
As readers of NEXT100 know, Smart Grid encompasses a wide range of communications, computing, sensing and control technologies that will work together to improve service reliability, lower customer costs and minimize the environmental impact of generating, distributing and using electrical power.
Since Smart Grid spans so much of the utility’s electric operations, that means Kevin will have to coordinate with a host of other business lines to get everyone on the same page with respect to our vision, priorities and deployment plans. To say the least, that's no easy task at a huge utility.
He’ll have to work especially closely with the information technology group, which plays a critical role in capturing and processing the tidal wave of data gathered by smart meters, distribution grid sensors, power storage devices, smart charging stations for electric vehicles and other Smart Grid components.
A critical role for the IT group—and a requirement set by the CPUC—is to ensure the security and privacy of Smart Grid communications and computing networks. It goes without saying that Smart Grid will attract its share of smart villains who will try either to break it or break in. Fortunately, PG&E can draw on a number of robust industry security standards to keep them at bay.
Last but not least, Kevin will have to make his best stab at answering the $64 billion question: How much will Smart Grid benefit customers?
A lot of industry boosters, from the U.S. Department of Energy to various utility associations, have no doubt that the benefits will be enormous. “The societal business case for grid modernization is compelling,” declares a report by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. “The benefits to society will be $638 to $802 billion. . . . While not free, the collective value of these grid modernization benefits far exceeds their cost.”
But a lot of consumer and regulatory groups aren’t so sure. The Maryland Public Service Commission recently shocked the utility industry by rejecting a proposal by Baltimore Gas and Electric to install smart meters, saying the company hadn’t proven the benefits to customers. The decision put at risk a $200 million award from DOE under the Smart Grid stimulus funding program. (BG&E has filed an application for a rehearing of its proposal.) And earlier this year,
California's PUC has long been scrupulous about requiring careful business-case justifications for utility investments; PG&E and the CPUC used independent experts to analyze the costs and benefits of the SmartMeter™ program in great detail before moving ahead with deployment in 2006.
So it’s no surprise that the commission has asked the utilities it regulates to prepare high-level cost estimates of the Smart Grid technologies and investments they expect to undertake over the next five years, as well as the many benefits, which include lower electric bills, increased reliability and improved compliance with the state’s mandates for greater use of renewable energy. The commission recognizes how tough this request may be given that many critical technology standards are not even settled.
“Putting all these pieces together—our vision and strategy, deployment roadmaps, security programs and estimates of costs and benefits—will be like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” Kevin told me. “The challenge is that the Smart Grid will evolve over time so we don’t yet know exactly what the picture looks like or even the shape of the individual pieces. But if we do it right, we'll have a chance to significantly improve the lives of our customers and lead our industry into the 21st century.”
Jun 24 2010
The future of the much-heralded “Smart Grid”—which will leverage advanced communications, computing and control technology to provide more affordable, reliable and cleaner electrical service—looks brighter today thanks to two decisions by the California Public Utilities Commission.
The more obvious of the two decisions sets forth Smart Grid deployment guidelines for the state’s investor-owned utilities, which are subject to CPUC regulation.
The other decision approved $357 million in capital spending through 2013 for PG&E’s Cornerstone Improvement Program, which aims to significantly improve service reliability for many of the utility’s more than 5 million electric customers in Northern and
Cornerstone isn’t a traditional program to improve reliability by trimming vegetation or replacing old poles. Rather, the concept is to create more capacity and interconnectedness on the power grid, so outages can be isolated and power flows redirected onto neighoring circuits to restore service to customers as quickly as possible.
Contained within this scheme are the seeds of what I call “smart grid lite”—a program to automate selected distribution network operations to radically improve the speed of service restoration from hours to minutes, without the need for human intervention. It would be a first step toward what some visionaries call a “self-healing grid.”
While PG&E engineers are still evaluating how to invest the CPUC-approved funding to maximize benefits to customers, one promising approach under consideration is to build on the success of a pilot program launched in
From 2006 to 2009, PG&E installed dozens of “intelligent switches” in selected circuits in the city. They automatically detect a short-circuit, shut down to protect the system, then communicate among each other to locate the segment of line where the fault occurred. The switches then reopen on other line segments, isolating the problem to as few customers as possible.
Many if not most customers on these circuits see service restored in less than five minutes. In one event two years ago, which affected 2,500 customers, 1,900 came back on within less than two minutes. The system has worked successfully several times this year as well.
Utility industry engineers call this Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration, or FLISR. A report prepared in 2007 for the California Energy Commission on the “Value of Distribution System Automation” confirmed that automated switching can “significantly” limit customer outages.
As Oracle Corp.’s Kevin Costin observed, “from the customer perspective, FLISR is appropriately viewed as a first step toward a self-healing grid -- a grid in which coordinated automatic controls minimize outage durations and the number of affected customers.”
In today’s ruling on Smart Grid, the CPUC cited among the many “substantial benefits for consumers” from Smart Grid the fact that “Greater monitoring and automated controls can . . . reduce the frequency and duration of outages.”
That sounds exactly like what PG&E hopes to undertake as part of the Cornerstone program. It will be years before PG&E or other utilities achieve a truly “self-healing grid.” But Cornerstone may well begin the process of helping customers realize the benefits of that vision.
Jun 22 2010
Those who follow smart grid developments knew it was quite an honor recently when PG&E and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won Connectivity Week’s prestigious SmartGrid Buildy Award, presented to “leaders, visionaries and implementers of smart devices and smart systems in the context of commercial buildings, residential, energy management and other applications.”
The two winners were recognized for their joint pilot project last year to make automated management of customer electrical demand as valuable a resource as new generation on California’s electrical grid. The project demonstrated the ability to take a signal from the the state’s electrical grid operator, transmit it to the energy management systems of three large PG&E customers (an industrial bakery, a retailer and a local government office), and cut their line process, heating, ventilation and air conditioning load within minutes. All that happened without manual controls or human intervention.
Why was that demonstration such a big deal? The key operational challenge facing any electric utility is to match supply and demand, second by second. As demand fluctuates up and down, utilities must ramp generators up and down accordingly. They must also buy more reserve power on the wholesale market ahead of demand peaks, typically on hot summer days when customers crank up their air conditioners.
Building new generators to serve spikes in demand that may last only a few hours a year is extremely expensive—and none too good for the environment, either, since such generators typically burn fossil fuels.
If customers would instead reduce or shift their demand, utilities could avoid buying expensive power during peak periods. If coordinated with wholesale energy markets, such customer “demand response” would be valuable enough to merit rewarding them handsomely for saving everyone money.
As an added bonus, customers who take part don’t need to sacrifice in order to enjoy the rewards. Most of us never notice if a building’s energy management system turns down the air conditioning for a few minutes or dims the lights a bit.
Demand response is a top priority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In parts of the country that encourage it, demand response has "aided in providing greater grid reliability, mitigation of generation market power, and an overall decline in fuel-adjusted power prices in organized wholesale markets,” FERC notes in its National Action Plan on Demand Response, published this month.
What was new and significant about PG&E’s award-winning pilot with LBNL was the demonstration of sophisticated smart grid technology, using open standards, to automate the response by large commercial and industrial customers, so their demand could be adjusted within minutes to changing grid conditions. (The figure at left shows results from a previous, less exacting demonstration of automated demand response.)
The next step for PG&E this year will be to explore the potential of using demand response help integrate wind and solar power—which fluctuate with the weather—onto the power grid by matching supply and demand in real time. If it works, PG&E and other utilities should be able to significantly reduce their reliance on fossil fuels for generation.
Note: PG&E’s Steve McCarty will be discussing last year’s pilot at the National Town Hall Meeting on Demand Response and Smart Grid this Thursday in Washington D.C.
Jun 21 2010
Wouldn’t it be great if you could lower your electric bill, enjoy more reliable service and spare the environment? That’s why many in the utility industry are so excited about the potential for leveraging smart meters in homes and businesses to help customers make better use of energy—often without even having to think.
Smart meters measure energy use on a periodic basis (typically hourly) and report back to the utility over a digital communications network, doing away with the need for monthly manual meter reads. They allow utilities to offer price plans that let customers save money and reduce pollution by shifting energy use from peak to off-peak periods, such as nighttime or early morning.
Newer smart meters, such as those PG&E is installing throughout its service area, can also communicate with in-home displays that show customers how much energy they are using and at what price. The meters also communicate with smart thermostats and appliances, which can be programmed to operate during hours when there's less demand for power and lower prices.
It’s easy to rhapsodize about this vision but very hard to pull it off. It’s an enormous challenge just to test and install millions of new meters, build out a huge communications network to support them and then manage the tidal wave of data they transmit.
It will be another huge challenge to make the new meters communicate seamlessly with consumer energy displays from dozens of manufacturers, and appliances like smart washing machines that start their loads only when electricity prices drop to a programmed level.
And it will likely be an even more immense challenge to integrate all this infrastructure with “smart chargers” that “refuel” electric vehicles when the utility signals that power is available cheaply.
If PG&E and other utilities overcome these challenges, some of the credit will surely be due to PG&E’s
I toured the lab today with its manager, Arthur Anderson. Pointing to a large array of meters, energy displays and communications modules lining the wall, he explained, "The idea is for us to identify emerging technologies early and to analyze the risks here, rather than in a production setting. Here they can fail with no risk to PG&E or our customers."
The lab includes a shielded RF room, which tests radio transmitters and receivers under a wide range of temperatures, interference and other conditions to measure power, sensitivity, signal clarity and reliability.
The lab also tests whether devices communicate according to accepted standards—which a surprising number don’t. A lot of small companies evidently don’t have the resources to master the new “smart energy” standards, and some bigger ones haven’t shown the focused commitment necessary to make their gear work.
Until they do,
In fact, the lab has helped even the best vendors in the field discover and work out bugs that could jeopardize performance. “Every device we've worked with, we've found issues in intensive testing,”
The lab will be supporting small field trials later this year, using selected PG&E employees to test the functionality of so-called “home area networks” that integrate smart meters, energy displays and energy controllers. The trials will test the ability to introduce new devices (like off-the-shelf energy monitors) to the network, receive pricing signals from the utility and help customers understand and manage energy use to lower their bills.
While I was visiting, another group from PG&E was using the lab to test the ability to register customer energy display devices with the utility so they could receive information from the smart meter. I must have brought good luck, because they actually got it to work.
Customers are going to be asking a lot of good questions once they get their hands on these displays and finally have a chance to analyze what's sucking up their electrons--and their dollars. Hopefully, by turning every customer into a detective, we will all use energy more efficiently, lower bills and spare the environment
Mar 31 2010
Engineers and planners at utilities across the country are laboring mightily to get a handle on the technical, operational and financial requirements of Smart Grid, a vision of leveraging the power of information to provide more affordable, reliable and environmentally sustainable service to electricity customers. Creating a smarter grid, the experts at PG&E tell me, is an evolutionary process that will take years to implement.
But they'll have to hurry to keep up with the all the visionaries who are creating future road maps for the industry. Smart Grid is already in danger of becoming passe, before anyone has even built one.
This week a group of international energy and climate experts, assembled by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, unveiled a major study calling for creation of a "SuperSmart Grid" to power all of Europe and North Africa entirely by renewable energy by 2050.
Today only about 15 percent of Europe's power comes from renewable resources, mostly traditional hydropower. This plan would require decomissioning vast numbers of fossil-fuel power plants, starting around 2030, and tapping instead:
- the enormous solar potential of southern Europe and the deserts of North Africa
- the hydro capability of Scandinavia and the European alps
- onshore and offshore wind farms in the Baltic and North Sea
- the continent’s ocean tidal and wave power, and
- biomass generation across Europe
“Climate change requires an ambitious vision and collaboration across borders and boundaries we have not previously envisaged," said Antonella Battaglini of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the contributors. "If we don’t examine the art of the possible, we will never inform critical policy decisions that need to be made sooner rather than later. This study represents a major milestone in the effort of unravelling the Gordian knot of policy, and finding workable solutions to the EU’s power supply, security and carbon challenges.”
The report is a bit vague about the price tag for all this, but says reassuringly that "the short-term costs of transforming the power system may not be very large." It assumes that expansion of renewable energy technologies (particularly wind and solar thermal) will dramatically reduce their costs to become competitive with fossil fuels--a debatable proposition (in the absence of large carbon taxes).
The report also notes that a "true SuperSmart Grid" will require high-capacity transmission lines to be built between North Africa and Europe--as well as a major upgrade of transmission capacity within each region. "There are not yet any estimates available as to the system requirements and the associated investment costs," it concedes.
It's easy to produce road maps like this if you don't have to take the steering wheel. It's also easy to take potshots at such armchair visionaries, but that would miss the point. Building a SuperSmart Grid may take a lot longer and cost a lot more than these promoters acknowledge, but I'm glad someone is starting to point us in the right direction, so we can at least get started.
Mar 23 2010
The report, “Assessment of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Integration with ISO/RTO Systems,” prepared by a group of 10 electric grid operators across the
Within
Looking ahead, the report estimates that private and government purchases of electric vehicles in the Bay Area will exceed 90,000 by 2019, behind
To service these new electric cars just in the
“There is huge momentum here,” PG&E’s Andrew Tang told the New York Times.
They key to making the transition run smoothly is finding ways to stagger vehicle charging and to concentrate it during off-peak hours at night.
The report proposes the adoption of dynamic pricing to give customers incentives to shift their charging time to off-peak hours, as well as emergency load curtailment – in effect, the ability to stop charging cars temporarily to prevent a system overload.
Managing a broadly distributed smart charging infrastructure will require increased communications capabilities along with traditional electric infrastructure—transformers, wires and the like. Or as PG&E’s Tang has emphasized, it will require a smart grid. That's one reason California utilities are leading the national push for smarter electric infrastructure.
Feb 16 2010
A typical "D" battery stores enough energy to deliver five watts of power for one hour. Now imagine more than five million such batteries strung together, and you get a sense of the storage capabilities of an advanced sodium-sulfur battery that PG&E plans to install later this year on its grid to support customer needs. It will be the largest battery storage system in California.
I guess that's what they mean by the term "utility scale."
The goal of PG&E's battery storage project isn't to operate five million flashlights or clock radios, but to provide backup power to customers in case of a power failure, improve power quality by smoothing out small variations in voltage and frequency, and help manage the ebb and flow of intermittent wind and solar power so the utility can handle more renewable energy.
PG&E's planned battery installation, which just won funding support from the California Energy Commission, will have a projected life of 15 years. It will also support a 36-month demonstration project to study the value of storage in the utility's distribution system.
"Energy storage will become critical as we migrate to California's future 'smart grid' and integrate renewable energy sources, manage peak demand, and relieve transmission line congestion," said James Boyd, vice chair of the Energy Commission. A 2008 report by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers said "massive energy storage . . . is a key to making the use of renewable energy possible on a broad scale."
Besides the Energy Commission, PG&E's partners in the project include the Electric Power Research Institute, which will help design and analyze results of the pilot project; NGK Insulators Ltd., which makes the batteries and promotes their use in a wide range of utility applications; and S&C Electric, which is handling design engineering and construction services.
Sodium-sulfur batteries run too hot to use at home or in your car. But they store a great deal of energy in a small space and have a long life, making them ideal for utility installations. In the United States, such batteries have been tested or used by American Electric Power, Long Island Power Authority and Xcel Energy.
PG&E is still working on the details, but plans to install the 4 megawatt battery at a site in Silicon Valley, where it will be easily accessible for study and where customers will appreciate its impact on service reliability. The goal is to have it operational by the fourth quarter of 2010.
Batteries are only one form of storage open to utilities. PG&E has long operated a pumped hydro facility, which generates power during the day by running water from a mountain reservoir through a turbine, then pumps the water back up into the reservoir at night when demand falls and power is cheap. PG&E is considering adding more such storage to its system.
PG&E also won funding last fall from the Department of Energy to pursue a project that will store energy during off-peak hours in the form of compressed air held in porous rock formations underground. As the air is released, it can be used to help spin turbines that will generate electricity. The project will be well-suited to storing excess wind energy generated at night.
