Smarter Grids for Smarter Cities

Credit: Giant Ginko/Flickr

The smart grid, long past due, is getting closer to becoming a reality. In a digital age, where smart phones and other gadgets ensure we’re always just a keypad or an email away from two-way communication, the old electricity grid is starting to look a bit like an antique. After all, a human being still visits your house every month to read your meter—otherwise, you and your utility would have no idea how much power you were using.

The smart grid promises to revolutionize the current electric grid, which is said not to have changed its technology much since the 1960s, when space race was hot and women wore bouffant hairstyles. And this has come at a cost: The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. grid a D+ grade in their 2009 Report Card of America’s Infrastructure.

Smart grid technology includes everything from interactive appliances in homes to sensors on transmission lines. Generators of electricity, suppliers and users are all involved, and the smart grid is essential to managing the intermittent energy production from wind and solar power. For the average utility customer, the smart grid would mean the opportunity to have two-way digital communication with an energy provider, meaning you can control just how much power you use and when you use it. If you have excess power from, say, your rooftop solar panels, you can sell it back to the grid. The consumer of power would be able to become also a producer of power (ConEdison has an animated video showing how this could work).

The smart grid could mean a more reliable electrical system, possibly eliminating blackouts and brownouts as it evenly distributes energy—a relevant point when our demand for energy has resulted in a 124 percent increase in blackouts in the past two decades, costing Americans billions. It could mean the implementation of technology to transfer green power such as wind and solar from remote areas to places of high demand. And it could mean a reduction in carbon emissions and the creation of jobs to maintain the new system.

Austin, Texas: The Pecan Street Project

Some cities and regions are particularly ahead of the game when it comes to adopting this new grid—which, experts say, is most certainly the energy wave of the near future. In December 2008 Austin, Texas publicly lanched the Pecan Street Project, a community-wide effort toward smart energy use. Austin, which has a public utility and was named an NRDC Smarter City for its municipal energy management, is a progressive, tech-savvy city that happens to be sitting in the only state that operates on its own energy grid. This makes it fertile testing ground for this new technology, according to Brewster McCracken, executive director of the Pecan Street Project : “We’re in a position to offer a contribution,” he said. And McCracken thinks this contribution is significant now; he says markets are reaching their tipping points where the old electric grid won’t be able to support the number of electric cars plugging in. “Business as usual won’t be an option,” he said.

Boulder, Colorado: SmartGridCity

Boulder, Colorado, was the first city in the world to fully implement a smart grid pilot program, called SmartGridCity, through Xcel Energy in September 2009 ; it cites preliminary results of a 90 percent reduction in outages and voltage complaints since its inception. Much of the infrastructure has already been implemented, allowing the utility to monitor customer meters and respond to individual outages, and more than 20,000 customers can participate actively in their energy use through an individualized account on the Web. Next up will be in-home smart devices, like wireless two-way thermostats, and the technology for plug-in vehicles.

In another venture, American Electric Power and Battelle Energy Technology are currently launching an integrated smart grid system in northeast Columbus, Ohio, that can cover 110,000 consumers and should be fully implemented in three years.

The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project

With the September 2009 announcement of $620 million in federal funds from the U.S. Department of Energy for 32 smart grid projects throughout the country, many such projects have picked up steam. And with $88 million from the DOE, the biggest, most comprehensive smart grid project of all kicked off: the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, which will include 11 utilities in five states and will be managed by Battelle through the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Currently, the venture, for which the rest of the $178 million will be covered by private investment, is in the initial design phase, and installation will begin in fall 2010 and last about two years. A demonstration phase will go on for five years to test the feasibility of the project.

What makes Battelle’s Pacific Northwest plan different (and perhaps more impressive and influential) than other smart grid initiatives across the country is its sheer scale. It will cover all aspects of smart grid technology, from smart meters to electric cars, and it will reach 60,000 metered customers, including residents, businesses and other organizations. The initiative will be implemented at 15 test sites stretching across Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, including places as varied as Fox Island, Washington, and the peaks of western Wyoming. It is the first project with such a great geographic diversity. The project will involve more than 112 megawatts of power, which is enough to serve 86,000 households, and at its peak, it could create 1,500 jobs.

Evan Jones, deputy project manager for the Pacific Northwest project, stresses the need to tailor the usability of the grid to a variety of different consumers, where each point may have a different requirement. For example, Jones said, the University of Washington may have very different energy needs than, say, a rural location in Montana—and both are areas that will be covered in the Battelle initiative. This will always be true, he said, stating that different people will interact with the grid in different ways, and some perhaps never at all: “It is not our job to determine how people interact with the grid, but just that they can participate in it.” In laymen’s terms, he compares this concept to the voluntary, widespread adoption of the Internet.

Each of these projects is intended to serve as a model to the rest of the country. “This program is being planned in such a way that it should be applicable to all parts of the country,” said Mani Vadari, vice president of energy infrastructure for Battelle, of the Columbus project. About Austin’s Pecan Street Project, McCracken said “We believe our project is only relevant if applicable to elsewhere in the country.”

Jones agreed, saying the smart grid can be adapted to most types of utilities and most types of business models. But he is also careful not to count any chickens before they hatch, given that this project is groundbreaking in terms of scale. “We’re still doing an experiment, and it’s got to prove itself out,” he said. “We’ve got three to four years of experimenting left to do.”