FORESEEING THE SMART GRID

PECI Paper Explains How Energy Savings Fits Into Effective Smart Grid Deployment; The paper asserts that buildings must work properly and integrate effectively with the smart grid to realize energy savings and maximize smart grid investment
Debra Sonner and Sara Maudlin, August 4, 2009 (Portland Energy Conservation, Inc.)
and
GridWeek: Chu Lays Out DOE’s Smart Grid Vision, Standards to Come; Energy Secretary Steven Chu briefed an international audience on America’s broad-ranging smart grid goals. Next up is a new round of federal smart grid standards due Thursday
Jeff St. John, September 21, 2009 (Greentech Media)
and
Secretary Chu Presents Smart Grid Vision and Announces $144 Million in Recovery Act Funding to Transition to the Smart Grid
September 21, 2009 (U.S. Department of Energy)

SUMMARY
This is GridWeek 2009.

Not as high up on the priority list as Super Bowl Sunday and Mardi Gras? The next time a wind blows a tree branch into a power line and shuts down the Eastern Seaboard for 3 days, like it did in 2003, that priority list could change.

It could also change if terrorists were to hit any of the innumerable places in a national transmission system former CIA Director James Woolsey said probably couldn’t be intentionally designed to be more vulernable and fragile.

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The priority list definitely changes when it becomes clear the most intractable impediment in the U.S., in the EU, in China and almost everywhere else in the world to a shift to New Energy, Energy Efficiency and a New Energy economy is the lack of smart, high capacity transmission.

Wiring the Smart Grid for Energy Savings: Integrating Buildings to Maximize Investment, a recent paper from Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. (PECI), highlighted the single most important point about the Smart Grid: After all the shiny doo-dads that make it possible to program the Tivo from Bermuda and find out what curdled in the ‘fridge from the subway and turn down the A/C on the dog from the beach, the point is to cut energy consumption.

That’s what makes GridWeek 2009 so important.

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COMMENTARY
U.S. Secretrary of Energy Steven Chu kicked off GridWeek 2009 with a keynote address. He highlighted the many importances, challenges and opportunities that will come with the development of 21st century transmission and a Smart Grid. A robust, efficient, secure electricity delivery system can allow for the growth of New Energy, give consumers the ability to manage their energy use and become the foundation for a sustainable, prosperous New Energy economy.

The conference was held for representatives of utilities, power companies, government agencies and regulatory organizations from 22 countries in Washington, D.C., while world leaders met at the United Nations in New York City to talk about global climate change. It is arguable that what was discussed at GridWeek will have a more immediate impact than the speechifying at the UN.

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The Obama administration began funding its ambitious plans for a high voltage national transmission system with Smart Grid capability when it included a multibillion dollar allotment in the stimulus package passed in February. That funding package included $4.5 billion for Smart Grid development, $750 million in loan guarantees for new transmission projects and $6.5 billion to the Western Artea Power Administration (WAPA) and the Bonneville Power Admnistration (BPA) to strengthen transmission capacity in the West, where there are enormous untapped New Energy resources.

Secretary Chu used his appearance at GridWeek 2009 to announce the availability of $100 million more for utilities to train Smart Grid implementation personnel and $44.2 million for state Public Utility Commissions to hire people to get Smart Grid implementation done.

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The ultimate goal is a national, high voltage tranmission superhighway that will bring New Energy onto the system and allow for its delivery from New-Energy-rich areas in little-populated regions of the country to meet the huge demand for power in highly-populated urban centers.

Smart Grid capability requires investment in information technology and communications systems like smart meters that allow 2-way interaction between power providers and power consumers so the providers can assist the consumers to respond to increasing and decreasing demand loads. The result will be energy consumption reductions and greenhouse gas emissions reductions for the nation and cost savings for the nation's ratepayers.

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As both PECI and Secretary Chu point out, the Smart Grid is not an end in itself. It is enabling infrastructure. To put Smart Grid technology to work, PECI calls for (1)
automated diagnostics so the system can stay at work, (2) demand response programs to provide the basic data and information; (3) aiming delivery of data and information about energy use at altering consumer behavior; and, (4) cost savings incentives from utilities to ratepayers for using the data to alter behavior.

Because buildings consume 70% of U.S. electricity, streamlining building electric loads would maximize energy savings. That is the primary focus of Smart Grid technology. Just making existing buildings more efficient could cut electricity use 5-to-10% and save hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The PECI paper calls for incorporating Smart Grid technology into existing efficiency programs and moving ahead with communication system standardization to obtain higher levels of interoperability in control systems.

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Secretary Chu indicated his Energy Department is already moving ahead with standardization for interoperability and promised a big announcement on that subject from Secretary of Commerce Gary Lockwood at the Thursday closing session of GridWeek 2009.

Secretary Chu demonstrated in some detail the way new, smart transmission will facilitate the growth of New Energy. Aside from getting New Energy from where it is to where it is needed, there is a more technical need for more high capacity, intelligent transmission. Most New Energy has a degree of predictable variability that a 21st century transmission system can readily incorporate, though such variability would stress or even compromise the present system.

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Secretary Chu is a strong advocate of pumped storage. That is the application of unused New Energy capacity to store water uphill so as to be able to recapture the energy when the water is released to run downhill at a later time. He pointed out, however, that energy is lost in the process, making such a system potentially more expensive than “spinning” fossil fuel reserves.

A form of energy storage Secretary Chu is more certain of is the coming opportunity to utilize the combined battery capacity of millions of plug-in vehicles as overnight storage for New Energy. Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology, however, is essentially unworkable at a meaningful scale without an efficient and smart transmission system.

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Much less is said about the security of the grid than needs to be said. For one thing, the smarter the grid gets, the more potentially vulnerable it is to hacking because the very 2-way communication that facilitates demand response also opens the system up. Just as the biggest internet enterprises in the nation from Google and Microsoft on down are working on interoperability, the country’s most important defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, are working on ways to secure the system.

A glance at the GridWeek 2009 sponsors indicates just how significant the gathering is: ABB, Cisco, Elster, GE, IBM, Itron and Siemens head the list. Just below them are Alcatel-Lucent, Ariva, GridPoint, HP, Intel…the list goes on.

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QUOTES
- Steven Chu, U.S. Secretrary of Energy, on the importance and security of the grid: "The grid is the most massive machine we operate... and the control systems for that will be very important," he said. "It has to be very high speed, it has to have automatic interoperability of high-speed communications, but it also has to be secured so the grid cannot go down."
- Chu on the Smart Grid: "My dream would be, you would have a very low cost RF mesh network that begins to interlink all your appliances, where you have that saver button or super saver button or energy peak button that talks to an energy interface where the consumer is blissfully unaware of what is happening…"

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- Hannah Friedman, Technical Director and Study Author, PECI: “There are pressing needs for focused research, especially in relation to how much energy savings the smart grid will truly enable…We believe that to fulfill the smart grid’s promise of energy savings, buildings need to function well. Poorly controlled buildings are not going to be able to effectively integrate with a smart grid that requires demand response and distributed generation. The energy savings achievable through the use of smart grid infrastructure will in turn make the investment more cost-effective for utilities.”

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- Chu on V2G technology: "It has always been my goal to do energy arbitrage with plug in vehicles…If you get half the cars with 50 to 60 kilowatt-hours of energy storage, it's an incredible amount of energy storage... and if you're willing to sell half the energy storage back to the company, much of our energy storage problems will be taken care of."
- Secretary Chu: “America cannot build a 21st Century energy economy with a mid-20th Century electricity system. This is why the Obama Administration is investing in projects that will lay the foundation for a modernized, resilient electrical grid…By working with industry leaders and the private sector, we can drive the evolution to a clean, smart, national electricity system that will create jobs, reduce energy use, expand renewable energy production, and cut carbon pollution.”