To find out what ordinary electricity customers know about and expect from the smart grid—broadly defined as a modernized electricity network integrated with digital communication technologies—I interviewed a variety of residential customers and one large commercial customer in Boulder, Colo., the site of Xcel Energy’s
SmartGridCity (SGC) project. (For the views of Boulder city officials and high-profile beta testers of the project’s various technologies, see these stories in the
New York Times from
Oct. 20 and
21.) The residential customers ranged from 30-something to 60-something, from condo owners to owners of midsize and large single-family houses, and their monthly electricity bills ranged from an average low of $25 to a seasonal high of around $850. (Full disclosure: I am a former Boulder resident, and most of the interviewees are people I knew while living there.)
I spoke to these individuals in late October, just as Xcel was starting to qualify “a limited number of households” for a pilot project to involve digital meters and energy usage monitoring (see sidebar). When asked, “How much would you say you know about Xcel Energy’s SmartGridCity project?” the answers varied from “almost zero” to “quite a lot,” though those who knew the most were in some way involved in the energy industry.
Although the pilot project only involves residential customers, I also wanted to know what one of the largest energy users in the city thought of SmartGridCity. I asked a representative the University of Colorado at Boulder’s (CU-Boulder’s) cogeneration plant how he expects the SGC project to affect the campus.
If Xcel uses the project for good substation control, that will enhance reliability for the university’s electricity supply in the long run, he said. The university already has good reliability, thanks to three main feeders coming into the campus. (The on-campus power plant is only run when it’s economical, or when there’s an emergency.) The university currently has a standard public utility commission rate for electricity from Xcel, but the spokesman said he did anticipate cost implications in the future if the utility went to time-of-use rates. As for information about and control over energy usage, CU-Boulder, like most large campuses, is already using a campuswide automatic meter reading system and meters all buildings individually.
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