Three steps to grid modernization

Phil Carson | Mar 01, 2011

 

Today, I'll offer more commentary from Steve Hauser, vice president for grid integration at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). If you haven't read yesterday's column, "Energy Grid Integration," I encourage you to do so, as it sets up today's piece.

Yesterday, Hauser described how his work at the Bonneville Power Authority in the 1980s taught him the value of actual field data on energy use, versus modeling alone—now one of the tenets of smarter grids. And he challenged the notion that everyone can have "access to any amount of electricity at anytime, anywhere."

Today, Hauser comments on NREL's role in creating the "toolkit" for utilities to respond to societal values and goals. (The following remarks are edited from a wide-ranging interview.) By "toolkit" Hauser tends to mean technologies and methods to integrate numerous grid technologies, rather than the individual technologies themselves.

"At NREL we want to understand the fundamentals of these issues so we can help the industry have better models and control systems, ways to optimize [the grid]," Hauser told me. "It's not a one size fits all, sledgehammer approach. It's a surgical toolkit."

How will grid optimization and integration move into utilities' practices? Hauser used specific examples to illustrate that this is happening now. His notion of "Grid 3.0" includes three basic steps that utilities will take over the next decade or two.

"Big utilities like Duke and Progress and Oncor are all starting to say, 'Wait a minute, we need much more sophisticated tools. If we're getting two-way communication with our meters, shouldn't we be able to do all sorts of other things?' And the answer is 'Absolutely.' If you're going to optimize your system, then you need to think holistically. And a lot of these utilities are starting to think that way. If I put a new transformer in a substation, how does that affect my overall plan for optimizing the entire system?

"On the flip side of that, a lot of public utilities—Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, for instance—now have ARRA-funded smart grid projects. They're focused on much smaller customer bases and optimizing while avoiding escalating costs. So I'm seeing a shift at IOUs and also a shift down at the smaller utility level. They just need a richer toolkit."

"Set aside IT for a moment," Hauser continued. "Just modernizing the system is important because the infrastructure is getting old. The next piece is to create the information backbone that allows you to optimize the system. You'll get more accurate, more real-time data. Everyone recognizes that we need better information and we need better tools to optimize the system. We need an information and communication platform to be able to do that. Once you've done that, you open up the opportunity for further innovation. This is the Internet paradigm. We built the Internet not knowing that eBay and Facebook would dominate the economics of it. In the energy space, I think we'll see some of that shift. That's the third step in this - the innovative applications."

Experiments in modernization and integration are coming in interesting places, Hauser said, and he touted a revised smartgrid.gov website that will maintain information on all the ongoing ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) projects around the country.

"Each of them has taken a different approach, although there are some commonalities," Hauser continued. "They've all looked at their challenges and said, 'Hey, this is our project and we'll do it the way we want to do it.' So there's a lot of variety and diversity in how these projects are being addressed, how these utilities are interacting with their consumers. They're not going to be perfect; there'll be lessons learned. But we're starting to see results emerge."

The other side of innovation is market-based partnerships, Hauser said, and he pointed to an example.

PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S., is working with the Philadelphia school system to buy a fleet of hybrid electric buses, which have predictable drive cycles, sit idle 20 hours each day and can utilize large capacity batteries. The school district can use the fleet to transport students, while the utility can charge them using wind power at night and, possibly, use the batteries in the afternoon when there's peak demand. PJM pays a premium for its use of the vehicles, which offsets the fleet's cost to the school district. 

"Without a smarter grid, those kinds of arrangements aren't going to happen," Hauser said. "[There are] all kinds of different scenarios that create win-wins with stakeholders that, heretofore, have not had a reason to work together."

On the public policy issue of climate change, Hauser sticks to his knitting—expanding the toolkit needed to achieve grid modernization and enable societal goals.

"Over the last decade, especially the last five years, something like a thousand cities in the U.S. have made commitments to significant reductions in carbon emissions," Hauser said. "They turn to their local grid operators to meet those goals. Typically, there are only one or two options. They can not build a coal-burning power plant they were planning to build. Or they could turn off an old plant without scrubbers and build a natural gas-fired plant in its place. As we move forward, having a more sophisticated infrastructure will give them more degrees of freedom to meet their societal-driven goals."

Yet Hauser recognizes that other forces are in play.

"When I talk to the under-35 crowd and explain why smart grid is important, their first question is, 'Why don't we do that already? That seems pretty obvious. We don't get what the issue is.' When these young people reach their 30s, 40s and 50s and they're in charge, they're going to say, the world has to run this way. We can't do it the old way."

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