Smart Grid: Smart business?

Smart Grid: Smart business?
XCEL TALKS GRID OF THE FUTURE WITH LOCAL BUSINESS COMMUNITY
By RICHARD VALENTY Colorado Daily Staff Writer
Friday, April 25, 2008

Craig Eicher, Xcel Energy's Area Manager for the Boulder Region, knows one phrase that will make people's ears perk up.

It's "Smart Grid City," a project that will come to Boulder in the near future - but also a project that very few locals understand in great detail. Eicher spent part of his Thursday morning giving a Smart Grid presentation to the business-oriented citizen group Boulder Tomorrow at the Spice of Life Event Center, 5706 Arapahoe Ave.

But it wasn't his first such presentation and it won't be his last.

Xcel recently chose Boulder to be the nation's first Smart Grid City. Eicher said the current grid system is basically a design that's more than a century old and delivers electricity in a "monodirectional" manner, while a Smart Grid will have interactive features that can allow both the utility and its customers to better monitor and/or control electrical loads or usage.

Xcel and several Smart Grid partners might invest up to $100 million to bring the project to fruition. Infrastructure expenses could include items such as "smart" substations and meters, diagnostic sensors throughout the system, and fiber optic cable for high-speed system communications.

Also, the project includes an outline of a "Smart Home," in which residential customers will be able use "smart" appliances that can sense grid conditions and, for example, turn devices off in a potential overload situation. The Smart Home of the future might include smart thermostats, or even a way to send electricity back to the grid via plug-in hybrid vehicles that aren't in use.

Eicher said Boulder was selected for the project partially because it is one of the most environmentally conscious cities in the nation. Also, he said the city has great scientific assets such as CU-Boulder and the NOAA/NIST federal laboratory campus.

"I think this is the very best city to do something like this, and I'm glad my company agrees," said Eicher.

He proceeded to mention a number of potential advantages to making the switch. For starters, the new system infrastructure will relay information about overload situations or outages back to Xcel.

"No longer will we have to rely on a phone call from you when there's an outage in your neighborhood," said Eicher.

The system will also be able to "tell" Xcel the location of an electrical problem, such as a bad transformer or a compromised cable. Eicher said the sensors will allow maintenance workers to go straight to where the problem is as opposed to searching for it, which could allow the utility to fix problems faster.

On the economic front, Eicher said limiting electrical demand during peak hours - such as hot summer afternoons when air conditioners are running full blast - can help Xcel avoid the need to purchase expensive additional power to meet the demand.

Environmental advantages could include the use of distributed generation technologies. For example, non-centralized wind or solar generators could be equipped with battery storage capacity so power could be available when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing - minimizing the variable nature of renewable generation supply.

Eicher also told the Boulder Tomorrow crowd about an actual Xcel alternative energy storage project -a wind-to-battery system in Minnesota in which the battery is about "the size of a tractor-trailer."

But he also said it will be a while before homeowners are receiving real-time information about grid conditions, or allowing the Smart Home to manage electric usage automatically.

Eicher said the "Phase 1" rollout will include building a communications network for about 15,000 residential customers, which will include "broadband over power line" capacity and fiber optic cable. He said the goal is to have the power lines and meters servicing the customers on the new digital network by the end of this summer.

"That will enable us to start offering more choices to our customers, and at the very least it will have the reliability component built in -such as the automatic sensing of outages, and perhaps the automatic switching of power around problem areas," said Eicher after his presentation.

Xcel's Smart Grid partners will also have various responsibilities.

The technology services firm Accenture will integrate diagnostic and other systems into Xcel's information technology infrastructure. The Current Group will work on monitoring and real-time data solutions. Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories will work on the smart substations. The software firm Ventyx will provide work management solutions -and all of the previous descriptions are very abbreviated.

Eicher said during his presentation that Xcel could ask Colorado's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) for permission to roll Smart Grid systems out to its other customers after the Boulder system is established, although he couldn't predict when that might happen.

But he also said that other cities around the country are seeing Smart Grid-type technology as a good investment. For example, Fort Collins is examining a smaller-scale project that could use distributed generation in an effort to establish a net-zero energy use district.

"The more people who are in this game, the more innovation there will be; the less expensive it will ultimately be; and the more accepting our customers will be of the new technologies and choices we'll be giving them," said Eicher. "All of that is good."

FYI

For more information about Smart Grid City, visit the Web site www.xcelenergy.com/smartgrid.