SmartGridCity: drivers and business cases
As I noted yesterday, my attendance at an Xcel Energy briefing on its SmartGridCity project was a window onto the global importance of such efforts.
Fully three-quarters of the audience was composed of businessmen from a Japanese utility (Kyushu Electric Power Company) and from a Chinese subsidiary of a Japanese industrial conglomerate (Hitachi Ltd.).
Kathleen Hoxworth, a senior project manager for Xcel's strategic technology efforts, offered both a broad look at the smart grid's drivers and a tailored look at Xcel's own interests.
Hoxworth cited estimates that electricity demand in the United States is forecast to triple by 2050 and that outages cost the U.S. economy $100 billion per year. Because generation will not keep pace with demand, efficiencies are the new name-of-the-game, and outages are expected to drop significantly as smart grid technology is deployed. (No surprises there.)
Hoxworth also cited the sobering fact that 40% of all Xcel employees are eligible for retirement in five years. One oft-cited benefit of smart grid activities is the notion that the new emphasis on intelligence on the grid beyond the transmission system will attract fresh talent to the industry.
Xcel Energy, a vertically integrated utility serving eight states and 3.4 million electricity customers, considers its SmartGridCity to be a technology pilot that should provide insight into 60 specific value propositions. These fall into three broad categories:
- Distribution system operational efficiency and reliability
- Energy efficiency and demand response
- Renewable energy integration
In the process, Xcel also plans to glean insights into the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) needed to implement and advance smart grid technologies and related services.
Why Boulder? Scale, Hoxworth said. About 50,000 customers made it a manageable size. The city's geographic location on the grid - it is something of a standalone service area for Xcel - made it ideal for experimentation. Demographics also were favorable, with a large proportion of early technology adopters and high environmental awareness. (Boulder is home to the University of Colorado and has been, shall we say, counter-culture friendly for a half-century.)
Also, Xcel found collaborative partners both in the city and county of Boulder as well as federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an office of the National Institute for Standards and Technology and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, all with major offices nearby. In addition, the town boasts a high rate of Internet penetration: 95 percent locally vs. 75 percent nationally.
In fact, enthusiasm for SmartGridCity in Boulder runs high and residents have made Xcel aware of their impatience with the lengthy process of implementation, according to Hoxworth.
SmartGridCity's major technology components include information technology (IT) infrastructure, its communications network, automated substations and feeders, current and voltage sensors and smart meters, Hoxworth said.
In the IT arena, Xcel is testing a score of applications and 95 interfaces between new and legacy systems over two new bus architectures. In its communications network, Xcel is laying the last of 200 miles of fiber optic cable for high bandwidth use. (Granite bedrock slowed the process and made it more expensive than anticipated.)
The utility has automated four of five local substations; the fifth one served just one large single customer. Four feeders have been automated and 23 are being monitored. About 4,700 transformers are being monitored. In the smart metering department, Xcel has installed about 21,000 out of its goal of 24,000.
As for in-home energy management displays, SmartGridCity has three pilot homes installed with a wireless gateway and programmable thermostats.
Which brings us to the present day: according to Hoxworth, Xcel is now reviewing a dozen in-home energy technologies and certifying those that pass muster (mostly on security grounds) for its customers. This summer, Xcel will add about 1,100 Boulder homes with in-home energy displays for an early pricing program that will provide time-of-use pricing, critical peak pricing and critical peak alerts with rebates for cooperative customers, Hoxworth said.
Until now, Hoxworth added, demand response in its Boulder service area is voluntary. Xcel sends a message to consumers who've signed up, but it cannot predict the response, an approach dubbed "spray and pray."
Already, due to the technology implementations on the grid itself, Xcel has seen a 90 percent improvement in unpredicted transformer outages. And that reflects Xcel's strategy for wider-scale smart grid implementations in its other service areas.
Xcel will identify the key technologies yielding definable returns-on-investment and determine whether they apply to the utility's other service areas, in some form or another.
In a future column, I'll give an up-close and personal view of the utility-facing dashboards enabled by SmartGridCity, which lend insight into the value proposition for distribution system automation.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
Comments
Nagging Questions....
"Hoxworth cited estimates that electricity demand in the United States is forecast to triple by 2050..."
Is that pre-SG or post-SG? Whichever, what's the other (the difference would be enlightening)? Do the estimates come from an unimpeachable source?
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"outages cost the U.S. economy $100 billion per year."
Outages are principally caused by weather related damage to distribution lines. Perhaps the SG will be able to speed "work arounds" following damage. Assuming so, that still won't cause the number of unique outages to drop "significantly". Then there's the problem of reconstruction which must necessarily be done while affected areas remain black (or are forced black). Ultimately, a manual interception of SG controls will be necessary to ensure that linemen aren't killed. Lockout-tagout procedures will remain popular.
Separately, I wonder how the $100 billion was calculated. How much of that goes to the reduction in utility revenues vs. private businesses. Somehow I doubt the entire $100 billion disappears into the ether.
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"....generation will not keep pace with demand..."
Demand can only rise to the level of generation capacity. Can "efficiency" really be the antidote given the 3X demand forecast? Of course not. Can the addition of renewable generation lead us to the goal line? Not likely even with the addition of energy storage technology.
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"One oft-cited benefit of smart grid activities is the notion that the new emphasis on intelligence on the grid beyond the transmission system will attract fresh talent to the industry."
Perhaps, but what is the nature of the "fresh talent"? I'm under the impression that SG efficiencies would result in lower labor costs, i.e. fewer people on the utility payroll. If that's the case, the SG is hardly a jobs program for utility workers. If it isn't the case, are the purported labor efficiencies exaggerated?
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"Demographics also were favorable, with a large proportion of early technology adopters and high environmental awareness."
So the results will be naturally skewed given the local culture. How about a control group that is, shall we say, more mainstream? The fact that early adopters may be able to stop the meter is less interesting to me that what happens to the meter at mom and pop's place.
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"In fact, enthusiasm for SmartGridCity in Boulder runs high and residents have made Xcel aware of their impatience with the lengthy process of implementation, according to Hoxworth."
Curiously, this notion runs contrary to a WSJ report that indicates Boulder's citizens have been slow to incorrigible with respect to energy efficiency programs including "cash for caulkers". If these early adopters are slacking, what will be needed to motivate "regular folks"?
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"Already, due to the technology implementations on the grid itself, Xcel has seen a 90 percent improvement in unpredicted transformer outages."
How does one score unpredicted outages? Are transformers allowed to fail to confirm the outage was predicted or is some subjective standard used?
Separately, I wonder about the cost s of predictive technology vs. the cost of traditional post-failure response. In either case, the customer suffers an outage (albeit under different conditions). I also wonder about the discrete numbers that support the 90% figure. Is the purported improvement over years or over a season. Are we talking about a handful of residential transformers or a serious number of substation transformers?
An in-depth article on this subject alone would be fascinating.
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Apologies to the author and Ms. Hoxworth for "nit picking". I realize in the space of a comfortably readable article, detail necessarily suffers. That said, my sense is that too much of our national SG discussion is being manipulated (with and without premeditation) by statistical representations that are, shall we say, carefully crafted.
Justification is often in the eye of the beholder. Still, one fact remains: Nothing sustainable can be carried on the back of unsustainable economics. The numbers must work or the notion of efficiency is patently false.
Boulder
I'll be interested in hearing more about how Xcel fares with its Boulder experiment. However another article on Ameren CIL caught my attention this morning.
Some customers may hand control of their thermostats to a local utility inreturn for a cash rebate or payment of some kind. But utilities should also consider other measures that leave customers in control and perhaps also avoid making them uncomfortable.
California's PIER project has invested a fair bit of money in a concept called precooling as applied to small and medium commercial buildings. The same idea might work quite well for residential buildings (in fact, I know it works in California's coastal areas because we adopted the concept instead of installing air conditioning). ICE Energy, which is located in Denver, makes a small ice machine that hooks up to residential air conditioners. Make ice at night, stay cool during the day. It is more expensive than a thermostat, but it might be a whole lot cheaper than a peaking plant.
Smart Grids are not just about fancy technology. Sometimes simple ideas work just as well.
Boulder
To be specific, Ice Energy is near Ft. Collins in Windsor (70 miles north of Denver) and they manufacture an energy storage unit intended for larger, commercial buildings. They may have a residential unit downt the road but there's no timeline yet.
Boulder
To be specific, Ice Energy is near Ft. Collins in Windsor (70 miles north of Denver) and they manufacture an energy storage unit intended for larger, commercial buildings. They may have a residential unit downt the road but there's no timeline yet.
Good point
Indeed, my colleague, Kate Rowland, wrote about the Ice Energy project with the Southern California Public Power Authority a few weeks back and you'll find that article here. Ice Energy is actually located in Windsor, Color., north of Denver.
And here's a column on the context on distributed energy storage, written to accompany Kate's article.
It seems that distributed resources of all kinds - generation, storage, virtual power/demand response, microgrids, energy efficiency - will all serve the utility and complement the centralized power structure.
And, to your point, keeping it simple - whether in a rate plan or a technology, is indeed to be prized.
Regards, Phil Carson