Be Cautious, but Don't Get Left Behind
"[AMI and smart grid] makes so darn much sense on paper. …It sounds like it’s a lot more complicated and expensive [and] you’ve got to have some relative standardization across the industry, and you have also got to deal with security issues," said one participant. "You never want to be on the leading edge or first wave of anything. …We will be a later adopter. I think there are a lot of utilities…to work out the problems and bumps." Fair enough. Change is scary, and early adopters assume greater risk. That may not be a risk that smaller utilities, for example, can always take.
But if nobody takes the risk of moving forward, where will North America be in another 10, 20, 50 years, as the rest of the industrialized world pushes ahead with smarter electrical infrastructure? Will this next respondent's comment still ring true? "If scientists from the past would come back, and we’re talking about people from 100 years ago… if they walked into our switchyards they would feel right at home with the technology because it is 100-year-old technology that hasn’t change[d]."
Several participants commented on the industry's aging infrastructure, so sooner or later, new investment needs to be made. Different utilities may find that it makes sense to start smartening up their grids in different places. For some, the choice may come down to what their utility commissions approve or what they can get federal funds to subsidize.
Where a utility starts may be less important than having a plan and making some initial moves. If smarter grid technology (everything from meters to distributed generation to an army of sensors embedded throughout the grid) reaches a tipping point (whether as a result of regulation, standardization, business model changes that affect smart grid economics, or something else), this executive's belief could become reality: "I believe we are going to see . . . more of a lot of advances in things like distributed generation, smart grid, etc. and a lot of development in that area. . . . I believe it will start slow at first and then move very rapidly. That's because once it starts, what we're going to find is that the utilities that haven't subscribe[d] to it, haven't embraced it, are going to fall behind very quickly."
—Gail Reitenbach, PhD is POWER's managing editor.
This story was originally published online 7/20/2010.
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