Australia
Australia may have one of the better-integrated smart grid plans, simply by virtue of having organized
Smart Grid Australia, “a non-profit, non-partisan alliance” that includes stakeholders from electric and telecom utilities, hardware and software vendors, investors, government agencies at all levels, plus research and nonprofit organizations. At least the Aussies have given themselves the opportunity to avoid working at cross-purposes. Some of this island nation’s initiatives follow.
In October, Australia announced plans to build the
world’s largest solar energy plant. At 1,000 MW, it would be three times the size of the current record holder, in California (the combined 354-MW Solar Energy Systems plants in the Mohave Desert). Adding renewables to its generation portfolio would enable Australia to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (native coal is its primary fuel) but would also complicate grid management without “smart” features.
Also in October,
EnergyAustralia—one of the largest electricity suppliers in the nation—announced that “Australia’s first smart grid suburbs will be created in Newington and Silverwater in a two-year trial by EnergyAustralia and Sydney Water to help households reduce their utility bills and carbon impact.” The trial will cost A$10 million. The utility said that “Total savings of more than $400,000 on household energy and water bills are expected over the two-year trial period, as well as a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of almost 2,500 tonnes.” The $10 million, two-year trial is supported by $1.5 million from the New South Wales Government’s Climate Change Fund.
In May, EnergyAustralia
committed a total of A$10 million in partnerships with the universities of Sydney and Newcastle to lead smart grid development in Australia and train the next generation of power engineers. This followed an Australian government announcement also in May that the government would invest
up to A$100 million to transform its grid into a smart grid.
Brazil
Brazil, the ninth-largest electricity producer in the world, already gets a majority of its megawatts from renewables—chiefly, large hydro generation—so integrating new, variable renewable resources is less of a SG driver than it is in many other parts of the world. Along with the rest of Latin America, Brazil has made only tentative steps into SG waters. Last summer, the government approved installation of the
first of 200,000 smart meters, by Landis+Gyr.
Perhaps the biggest smart grid news in this South American country is that the Nov. 10 blackout that affected more than a third of the nation’s population hit while the Smart Grid Latin America Forum was taking place in São Paulo. On Nov. 16, Energy Minister Edison Lobao said in a
statement that short circuits in a substation, caused by bad weather, resulted in the disconnection of three high-voltage transmission lines connected to from the Itaipú hydro-electric plant, Brazil's main power facility. However, weather scientists are disputing the likelihood of weather being involved.
Microgrid guru Kurt Yeager, who gave the keynote address at Smart Grid Latin America, told
SmartGridToday that Brazilian utilities are primarily interested in grid modernization because they want to sell more power.
(For an overview of Brazil’s power sector, see the
special report in the January 2009 issue of
POWER.)
Canada
In 2006, Ontario—Canada’s most-populous province—mandated that all electricity customers have smart meters by 2010, and it looks as if it will meet that goal.
In June, Ontario’s
HydroOne announced that it had installed 1 million smart meters and that 400,000 were on the way. According to the utility, “This is amongst the largest smart meter deployments by a utility in North America.” The company has already begun to transition to time-of-use (TOU) pricing, scheduled for 2010.
Toronto Hydro began shifting its customers to TOU rates in June 2009 and expects to have all customers on the new rates within 12 months. The utility claims that Toronto will be the first major city to have all of its customers on
TOU rates. In May the utility announced a
partnership with Google that will make it the eighth utility, and Canada’s first, to test Google PowerMeter, the search giant’s web-based
energy management tool.
According to a Mar. 15 story at
SmartMeters.com, “Overall Ontario, along with the state of California, is leading the way in smart grid technology development in North America. Hydro One spearheaded an effort to convince Industry Canada, the Canadian government entity responsible for business development, to dedicate a wireless communications spectrum for use by utilities to monitor their power grids. This forward-thinking move creates a standard throughout Canada. Standardisation is crucial for developers to have a development framework.”
At the federal level, Canada is facilitating standards development for the
interconnection of distributed generation resources.
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
