Smart Grid

What is the smart grid all about? A new book—a dictionary—attempts to define and demystify the jargon and bafflegab surrounding the buzzing smart grid. It’s a somewhat flawed but worthwhile first attempt at unraveling the often bizarre and sometimes baloney-filled smart grid nomenclature.

While industry interests were trying to get on board the smart grid gravy train last fall in Washington, D.C., in rural West Virginia folks were dealing with the force of a political locomotive pushing a high-voltage interstate grid, with property owners opposed and labor in favor.

Speaking yesterday at the opening of Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Fla.—the largest of its kind in the U.S.—President Barack Obama announced the largest single energy grid modernization investment in U.S. history.

A DOE public affairs contact confirmed to POWERnews on Tuesday that the department has canceled a planned second round of funding opportunities for smart grid–related projects. Initially, the DOE had planned to fund projects with American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) money spread over three rounds. Announcement of the third round’s cancellation was made at GridWeek in September, where it was also announced that the second round was being assessed.

The consumer, societal, and business benefits of grid moderniaztion are unclear, because the vast majority of grid-related stimulus funding appears destined to primarily expand, not cure, the ailing system we have today.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last week continued a series of hearings that assesses how proposed energy and climate change legislation could impact industry and economy. Last week’s hearing was titled, “Ensuring and Enhancing U.S. Competitiveness while Moving toward a Clean Energy Economy.”

Energy storage in the U.S. received another boost this week as two flywheel energy storage companies reported milestones, and KEMA briefed the U.S. Congress on policy issues that could impact the development and adoption of electricity storage technologies and applications.

There has been much excitement about the advent of the "smart grid" recently, especially because of the strong push by the Obama administration. Despite the simple-sounding term, the smart grid is not a simple concept.

At the opening ELECTRIC POWER 2009 plenary session, both the keynote speaker and the Power Industry Executive Roundtable participants kept circling back to the problems created by a public and lawmakers who seem to be promoting policies without an adequate understanding of energy realities. Most of the speakers acknowledged that the industry itself is partly to blame, but nobody offered a way forward.

Since 1882, when Thomas Edison installed the world’s first central generating plant in New York City, utility business models have varied little from the basic one: cover costs and generate profit by selling more electricity. But today, unprecedented challenges are sweeping through the industry. Soon utilities will face yet another new challenge: the large-scale implementation of distributed solar power, which can result in lower electricity sales. As solar implementation further challenges business-as-usual models, what’s a forward-thinking utility to do?

Clashes between industry and the Department of Commerce on backward compatibility of standards could stifle and delay the development of a “smart” electric transmission and distribution grid.

Q: What do you get when you gather roughly two dozen top researchers from academia, government, and industry to speak on interdisciplinary energy-related issues for a week?
A: A lot of informative but crowded slides, high-octane brain power, fact-based analysis of where we are and we’re headed globally, informed questions, and surprisingly practical answers.

As IEEE celebrates its 125th anniversary on May 13, it is also addressing the challenges ahead. The Center for Energy Workforce Development estimates that 45% of engineers in electric utilities will be eligible for retirement, or may leave for other reasons, in the next five years. What’s more, the educators of new engineers are also […]

Congress looks at what “smart grid” means and comes up with mixed definitions. The one thing everyone agrees on: The smart grid is going to be expensive.

On Thursday, while visiting Jefferson City, Mo., with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Vice President Joe Biden announced that, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more than $3.3 billion in smart grid technology development grants and an additional $615 million for smart grid storage, monitoring, and technology viability were being made available.

Experts assert that the U.S. grid—already proven by federal agencies to be vulnerable to cyber attacks—has been compromised by spies who tried to map the system and left bugs that could be used to disrupt networks at a time of war or crisis.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has contracted the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to help it develop an interim road map to harmonize interoperability standards for the smart grid.

Al Gore, in his recent New York Times op-ed titled "The Climate for Change," calls for a "$400 billion investment over ten years to construct a national smart grid to distribute renewable energy." Echelon supports these proposed investments. We also believe the answer is not just in constructing something new but in transforming the existing […]

What do you do when your research institution is losing roughly half a million dollars annually as a result of multiple electricity outages — and electricity demand keeps rising? If you’re the Illinois Institute of Technology, you turn the challenge into a campuswide learning experience by teaming with the Galvin Electricity Initiative and other experts to design and construct a prototype Perfect Power System (PPS). Even during its implementation, the PPS promises to provide more reliable and sustainable electricity to the university at a lower cost than it had been paying.

House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled a 648-page discussion draft of the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” a bill touted as a “comprehensive approach to America’s energy policy” because it seeks to establish, among other things, a carbon emissions reduction goal, a cap-and-trade program, and a federal renewable energy standard.

Building new transmission lines indicates support for the development of a national grid, but doing so would ultimately stifle entrepreneurship and innovation, a campaign focused on the creation of a “perfect” consumer-focused electric energy system has warned.

Beacon Power Corp., whose much-watched flywheel system is designed regulate grids using efficient energy storage, is teaming with American Electric Power (AEP) and Columbus Southern Power Co. to build a 1-MW regulation facility in the coming months at an AEP site in Groveport, Ohio.

ITC Holdings Corp. last week said that over the past year it has worked to develop the “Green Power Express,” a network of transmission lines that would move12,000 MW of power from wind-abundant areas in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa to Midwest load centers, such as Chicago, southeastern Wisconsin, Minneapolis, and other states that demand renewable energy.

The $825 billion economic stimulus bill rolled out last week by House Democrats includes $19.96 billion of tax incentives for wind and solar energy, $53.75 billion for direct spending on energy technology programs largely focused on energy efficiency and on the national grid, and $18.27 billion for water and environmental spending.

This spring, Xcel Energy, along with state and technology partners, is set to test what the utility says is the first battery capable of storing wind energy. The ability to store energy from renewable generation sources with variable output is key to maximizing the value of renewable power in general and to Xcel’s “smart grid” plans in particular.

Demand response and advanced metering programs have made significant progress in serving more consumers across the country, says a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) report that charts the expansion of these energy-saving programs since 2006.

An integrated matrix of 10 high-power flywheels built and tested by Beacon Power Corp. earlier this year successfully absorbed and supplied a full megawatt of electricity, the energy storage technology company said in September. The achievement could mean that grid regulation using efficient energy storage is close to commercial deployment. The flywheel system, called the […]

Last month, POWER explored the growing importance of the smart grid, which is envisioned as using digital technologies to enable integrated, real-time control of all the system’s elements, from generation to end use. This month we focus on the emerging technology of microgrids: controlled groupings of dispersed generation sources that are connected to the main electrical grid but that can function independent of it. We examine their benefits and their potential impact on 21st-century utilities and their customers.

The next-generation power grid—enhanced by digital technologies throughout the network to give generators, distributors, and customers greater control—promises to improve efficiency and lower operating costs. This year, in the most full-scale effort yet, Xcel Energy begins introducing intelligent grid technologies that it hopes will make Boulder, Colo., the first Smart Grid City.

In mid-2006, a Google search of the term “Smart Grid” generated around 2,000 responses. The same search this past month yielded more than 500,000 hits from a wide variety of sources. The explosiveness of the concept is especially interesting because there is no universal agreement on what constitutes a smart grid—much less agreement on what […]