Xcel Energy: Crunching data from SmartGridCity
Two things stood out from my visit yesterday to "Current House" in Boulder, Colo.
First, Xcel Energy is playing catch-up with the reams of data streaming from its city-wide smart grid technology pilot, dubbed SmartGridCity.
"We are up to our eyeballs in data analysis," is how Kathleen Hoxworth, Xcel's senior project manager for strategic technology and lead presenter, put it.
That's honest and not unexpected.
Hoxworth's statement echoed points made recently in this space by IDC analyst Jill Feblowitz. Utilities are installing smart meters by the droves and building intelligence into the distribution system, then turning on the data spigot and getting blasted by the firehose, with varying degrees of preparedness.
Analytics, of course, are the prize, the output that should yield insights into both utility-side efficiencies, operational improvements and, not incidentally, the business cases that might support further investments and/or rate cases. Customer-side data should provide the basis for demand side management, dynamic pricing schemes and the like, which in turn should yield further insight into consumer behavior.
The second thing that stood out for me was that, besides personnel from Xcel, the Current Group and one sustainability management consultant (Denver-based metavû), the room was filled with executives from a Japanese utility, Kyushu Electric Power Company, and a group from Beijing, China, representing a subsidiary of the Japanese vendor, Hitachi Ltd.
Kyushu Electric, like Xcel in Colorado, is a vertically integrated utility. Kyushu Electric generates, transmits and distributes power to eight million residential and business customers on Japan's southernmost island, which includes the cities of Nagasaki and Fukuoka. (Power sources include nuclear, hydroelectric and thermal.) Interestingly, this utility also has telecommunications and information technology operations, as well as bulk power production and consulting interests elsewhere in Asia.
While I did not interview the gentlemen from Kyushu Electric, it is not hard to imagine them applying the operational efficiencies and demand-side management lessons learned at SmartGridCity to their own utility - and those it advises across Asia.
Hitachi is one of those vast Asian conglomerates that has a hand in everything, from semiconductors to software, from IT to transportation, from servers to televisions to air conditioners. Whether they are looking into building smart appliances or delivering software/hardware for the grid itself, I frankly did not expect to be told. I let them be.
The upshot for me, instead, was that this Japanese utility and Chinese subsidiary of a Japanese vendor saw fit to send more than a half-dozen representatives each across the Pacific to the United States to see what we're doing. And, presumably, Boulder wasn't their only stop.
In a nutshell, on a randomly chosen Xcel tour day in Boulder (they are held twice each month), I was privy to the global, clean energy race-to-the-moon. And because Xcel's SmartGridCity is one of the few attempts to integrate many if not most of the currently available technologies and Xcel is a vertically integrated utility (at least in Colorado), this technology pilot has drawn massive interest from across the globe, an Xcel spokesperson told me.
For now, however, it appeared that the live functionality going on at "Current House" in Boulder is grid connectivity to the house's smart thermostat, which can be programmed via Xcel's My Account Web portal, a joint effort with GridPoint, Inc.
The house's lighting, too, had been controllable via the portal. But in another revealing detail, Hoxworth said, those controls were no longer supported by GridPoint. Which is simply to say that in the less-than-two-years Xcel has labored over this technology pilot, some technologies have been birthed and buried.
Another take-away: the laying of additional fiber optic cable underground for the communications network piece of the smart grid, at least in rocky Boulder, proved very expensive. Hoxworth said that utilities will probably end up using a mix-and-match approach of fiber optics, DSL, public and private networks, wired, wireless and microwave technologies, depending on their specific needs.
The main attractions in the Xcel briefing are the utility-side and consumer-side dashboards that deliver, respectively, operational and diagnostic metrics for grid operators and consumption and energy efficiency insights for consumers.
I'll treat those elements in tomorrow's column.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
Comments
International visitors
You're right. Boulder was not Kyushu Electric's only stop.