Panning for gold at IEEE PES 2010

Phil Carson | Apr 28, 2010

 

With time flashing by - at least judged by our hectic, modern lives - I thought I'd share a final harvest of nuggets gathered at last week's IEEE Power and Energy Society 2010 confab in New Orleans.

I've already shared a few chunks of ore gathered in "N'awlins" this past week, with columns on:

• "boot camp" with Wayne Longcore, director of architecture and standards at Consumers Energy (utility flexibility is needed for future, unpredictable end-use patterns);
• "the next big thing" (data analytics) with Ron Willoughby, a vice president and market issue leader in power system planning and management at KEMA, Inc.;
• " cyber security mantras from Dave Norton, a locally based, certified information systems security professional with Entergy;
• and a standards and interoperability update from Erich Gunther, chairman and CTO at EnerNex Corp.

 

Mark McGranaghan, a director in the power and utilization sector at EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) - and a "boot camp" presenter - said that we're building a "smarter" grid, in deference to the current level of controls and sensors and communications networks in place.

This is a global phenomenon and, if "smart grid" is variously defined, McGranaghan said, that's understandable due to its varied foci - from automated transmission and distribution (T&D) networks to distributed generation and storage to advanced metering infrastructure to demand response and direct load control.

One remark from Wayne Longcore in the "boot camp" session that I didn't report earlier this week leapt off the page just now.

"It's not about our control centers anymore, it's about the robots on the other side of the meter," Longcore said in reference to the proliferation of electricity-using appliances. "We are not building what you think we are building - this is becoming an 'energy ecosystem,'" he said.

Marty Travers, president for telecommunications at Black & Veatch, reminded me that the "telecom" piece at electric utilities is really a toolbox full of options, from fiber optic cable to public wireless networks, from land mobile radio to microwave. These options are being combined in a mix-and-match strategy to meet the unique needs of various utilities in disparate geographies.

As "last mile" mesh networks employ machine-to-machine (M2M) modules, Travers sees "smart farming" as a potential market, where water management meets electricity consumption, literally out in the field.

The communications network overlay on the grid has been made possible, in part, by the simple fact that costs have been driven down, Travers told me. But the United States market remains a state-by-state proposition.

"Our theory is that [smart grid work] is driven by regulatory input from the state public utility commissions, so it's still a state-by-state patchwork," Travers said.

In an emerging technology area, I spoke with representatives of the two most recognized superconductor companies. Both spoke of the hurdles to adoption of this technology, which include getting utilities to understand superconductivity's value proposition. The technology can be implemented in "cable," transformers, power generators, fault current limiters, wind turbines and storage, to name a few.

Art Kazanjian, general manager of SuperPower, Inc., talked about the long process from proof of concept to field trials to the "significant incentives" utilities need to take the plunge - a journey he described as "making it through the Valley of Death."

Kazanjian also bemoaned the uncertainty of federal funding for basic superconducting research, especially as the United States competes in this area with China, South Korea, Japan, Germany and Russia - some of which are not burdened by the democratic process.

Jack McCall, director of business development in T&D systems and marketing for American Superconductor, explained that the hurdles to adoption of superconducting "cable," for instance, include semantics.

"Superconducting 'cable' looks like something familiar, but it has very different characteristics," McCall told me.

Superconducting cable is much higher capacity than transmission cable as we know it (3x to 10x), it produces no electro-magnetic field nor is it affected by them, it is refrigerated in its own thermal environment, it requires a vastly smaller footprint (underground) and it has inherent fault current limiting properties.

This last property is an example of why it is hard to compare superconducting cable to cable used today, McCall said - superconducting cable's value isn't measured by the foot, because it depends on how it is applied in the grid, which can bring up concepts such as "avoided costs."

If you didn't make it to the IEEE conference, perhaps you too will see this column and its predecessors this week as valuable, at least by the yardstick of "avoided costs."

Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757