U.S. Smart Grid Forecast: Flurries of Activity

Gail Reitenbach

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Why is a power generation industry publication covering the smart grid (SG), which most people tend to equate with managing electricity use (and maybe its transmission)? Of the many reasons, here are two of the most obvious. Slowly but surely, SG projects will have implications for those involved in everything from resource management planning (Do we build another gas-fired plant, or add a solar plant to an existing gas plant, or integrate distributed solar resources?) to staffing power generation projects (Can we scale back at our thermal plants so we can add more maintenance staff for distributed generation resources?). Second, as more renewable resources get added to the grid, the operation and maintenance of baseload plants becomes more complex—at least until better grid-balancing tools are in place across the continent.

What Is the Smart Grid?

Definitions of the smart grid vary, depending on what country you’re talking about, what utility you’re looking at, and what policy initiative is under discussion. In general, smart grid goals in the U.S. include these (many of which are interrelated):

Slowing the rate of demand growth.
Delaying the need to build additional capacity.
Slowing the increase in emissions of CO₂ and other stack products.
Improving preventive maintenance/minimizing and shortening transmission and distribution system outages.
Balancing the grid, particularly renewable supplies.
Others.

In conjunction with POWER’s January forecasting issue, this report looks at the state of the smart grid and offers a few predictions about what its near-term future holds.

Also see the related stories that explore how other countries are implementing elements of a smart grid (“Which Country’s Grid Is the Smartest?”) and what residents of SmartGridCity expect from that city-wide experiment (“What Do Customers Expect from the Smart Grid?”).

Visualizing the Smart Grid

Unlike a utility-scale power plant, the smart grid is harder to visualize, more complicated to build, and will probably never have a final completion date. Though we talk about “the” smart grid, it’s less a single thing than an interlocking set of technologies and practices.

Think of the smart grid as composed of snow. Every snowflake—every individual element of the smart grid, from individual sensors to solar cells to smart meters—is relatively tiny. When you put a bunch of them together, as in a snow flurry, you start to see accumulated impact—from improved substation performance to a local demand curve with fewer spikes. To arrive at a scene in which snow blankets everything in sight, you need a lot of flurries over a period of time with conditions conducive to snow accumulation. So, too, with the smart grid.

To build something complicated and grand, you need a vision. A lot of folks in the infrastructure and public policy worlds seem to have a vision of what the smart grid should be. One of the problems is that the necessary incremental gains begin to sound boring when you encounter an endless flurry of press releases—unless your company or city is involved.

The Grid Is a Slow Learner

Few in the power industry would deny that the U.S. is way overdue to upgrade its electricity transmission and distribution grid. For well over a decade, technology vendors have been encouraging investment in transmission and distribution (T&D) projects, touting the merits for utilities and customers alike of digital tools to create a “smart” grid. Unfortunately for those manufacturers, “If you build it, they will come” remained mostly a wish rather than widespread reality.

Sure, there have been several relatively small-scale pilot projects involving everything from “smart/digital” meters to broadband-over-power line installations to digital fault-detection devices. But the cost of widescale implementation has been a showstopper for the most utilities—at least in the U.S.

Several converging factors indicate that 2010 may well be the year that the smart grid gets a substantial kick-start. They include:

The economic meltdown of 2008, which led to American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds being awarded in late 2009 for smart grid (SG) and T&D projects.
High unemployment, and the resulting desire of federal, state, and local governments to show that they are creating new jobs. Among the areas most promoted are clean energy jobs. T&D projects that enable new renewable generation to reach load centers are placed in this category.
Building momentum (internationally but also nationally) for climate change legislation, which puts a premium (one way or another) on low-carbon electricity sources. Renewable energy sources in many cases require new wires and more sophisticated grid management than current tools enable. Additionally, energy usage management, enabled by SG hardware and software, can mean reduced energy demand (MW) and consumption (MWh), hence lower (or slower-growing) greenhouse gas emissions.
On Sept. 24, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released “NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Release 1.0 (Draft),” which proposed 77 standards for smart grid development. As the draft report notes, “Without standards, there is the potential for these investments [from ARRA] to become prematurely obsolete or to be implemented without necessary measures to ensure security.”
The commitment of arguably the most influential corporation in the country, Google, to SG software and information management. For example, the company is promoting its Google PowerMeter, “a free electricity usage monitoring tool that provides you with information on how much energy your home is consuming. Google PowerMeter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information for you on iGoogle (your personalized Google homepage). And, Google PowerMeter is free.” This initiative has utility partners in the U.S., UK, and Germany, though more are said to be testing the service. Former astronaut Edward Lu, a physicist with a degree in electrical engineering, leads this Google venture.
Industry consolidation is picking up steam, with bigger and better-financed companies absorbing smaller ones. Consolidation could simplify decisions for utilities and standard-setting entities.