India
In February 2008, South Africa–based Grinpal Energy Management, a subsidiary of Saab Grintek, began installing the first smart meters in New Delhi. The prepaid electricity system includes a load limiter that sends a message to the customer to reduce electricity usage when demand is too high. It also prevents meter tampering. (You’ll recall that this was a concern raised by Dr. Rahul Tongia of the Bangalore think tank in his GridWeek presentation.) The goal was
500,000 installations by 2010. Since then, SG developments have included Tata Power’s launching the use of a
GE outage management system.
The government is also planning to increase the percentage of power provided by renewables, specifically, 20 GW of solar generation capacity by 2020, 100 GW by 2030, and 200 GW by 2050. Distributed solar generation—including a million 3-kW-average rooftop systems by 2020—is part of the
Solar India plan, according to a
final draft dated Apr. 29, 2009.
India also has what blogger Lisa Margonelli calls a “
DIY Totally Scrappy Unintentional Smart Grid.” She wrote in April: “Check out this
article in the Times of India about the entrepreneurs who have gone into the business of making electrical inverters that enable people to charge batteries from the grid and then run their appliances on DC power from the batteries. India’s utilities spend much of the summer stressed out, aggressively “load shedding”—ie [sic] scheduling rolling blackouts to neighborhoods and businesses daily. To accommodate this, people have started installing batteries and inverters so that they can run their TV's, lights, and fans during regular brownouts.”
Indians, it appears, aren’t waiting for the government or utilities to integrate battery energy storage into the grid!
Italy
Italy’s largest electric utility, Enel (at the time state-owned) began introducing smart meters in 2001, and smart meters have been compulsory for all electricity providers since 2006. The
government’s timetable is for 95% of customers of the approximately 100 electricity companies to be on smart meters by 2011.
At GridWeek 2009, Livio Gallo—chief operating officer of Enel’s Infrastructure and Networks Division, and executive chairman of Enel Distribuzione, the major Italian electricity distribution company—included in his presentation a
slide that proclaimed “Enel network is the largest Smart Grid in the world.” The company has 32 million customers using automatic meter management, more than 100,000 substations are remotely controlled, and automatic fault-clearing procedures have been implemented, among other advances. Enel’s total investment has been over €2.5 billion, according to the presentation, and has resulted in a “dramatic reduction of cash-cost per customer.” Quality of service and key performance indicators (such as reduced energy consumption, reduced peaks, and reduced electricity bills) have also improved dramatically. Among its future SG goals is collaboration with Google to develop web applications.
Japan
Japan’s SG focus is on a bidirectional power and communication system, with emphasis on the distribution and customer side. Much of its SG activity is sponsored by its New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (
NEDO).
Japan has already conducted several
SG demonstration projects, including those deploying grid stabilization technologies (at least some of them battery-based) for large-scale photovoltaic (PV) and wind generation. Given that the country is planning for high penetration of PV after 2010, SG technology is needed to integrate this variable generation.
GridWeek presentations noted that
Japan and the State of New Mexico are working together on green grid projects and that Japan has been introducing its manufacturers to the U.S. market. The country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is in the process of identifying a potential country with which to “establish a cooperative partnership.”
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