Smart Grid Award

2011 will be the inaugural year for this new award from POWER. Although the magazine has traditionally focused on the supply end of the power industry, the business and technology of power generation will become increasingly affected by downstream smart grid developments. This award recognizes an outstanding smart grid project, anywhere in the world, that demonstrates the benefits of new data-rich technologies to power generators, transmitters, and users.

Criteria

Specifically, we are looking for nominations of projects that are:

  • Upstream of smart meters and home energy management or automation devices, so no automated meter reading or advanced metering infrastructure projects, please—unless they are just a portion of a more comprehensive smart grid project that has several other non-end-user components.
  • Clearly “smart”—that integrate information and communications technology-assisted components that represent more than maintenance-level improvement.
  • Setting a new standard for quality and results. Being the “first” or “largest” or “cheapest” of a given type of project will be noted but will not be the weightiest  criterion. Whether large or small, the winning project will need to demonstrate achievement in technology and service that is worthy of being considered a best practice.
  • Able to demonstrate material results from at least six months of operation prior to the nomination deadline. No planned or in-progress projects, please. (We realize that all true smart grid projects are works in progress, but we are looking for projects with a defined scope that have been completed, monitored, and reported on.) For example, specify costs saved by end users, outages averted that would not previously have been avoided, dispatchable or controllable small-scale distributed generation resources added to the grid in such a way that they strengthen the grid rather than destabilize it, or some other metric(s) that illustrate the substantive benefits enjoyed by one or (preferably) more grid stakeholders.

When writing your project description, please be sure to explain it in non-jargon terms that would be understood by our broad audience—most of which is not in the transmission and distribution or smart grid world. If you have photos of the project that help tell the story, include one to four of those with your submission (low-res preferred at the nomination stage), as we will want images for our article on the winning project.

Award Process

The award winner will be selected by the editors of POWER based on nominations submitted by you and your industry peers—vendors, consultants, contractors, and operators of smart grid projects. If your project is selected as an award winner, a POWER editor will contact you to develop an article that will be published in POWER to inform the rest of the industry of your achievement. The Smart Grid Award winner will be profiled in the August issue of POWER .

Additionally, all winners will receive an invitation to the Power Industry Awards Banquet on May 9, which gives your peers the opportunity to acknowledge your accomplishments. The banquet takes place the evening before the start of the ELECTRIC POWER conference. (The 2011 conference will be held in Rosemont, Illinois, May 10-12.)