Smart Grids May Help U.S. Boost Power Capacity by 13% !!!!

Smart Grids May Help U.S. Boost Power Capacity by 13%


By Dinakar Sethuraman

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. may be able to increase power capacity by about 13 percent without adding plants by adopting “smart grids,” or energy networks that manage demand more efficiently, an engineering academic said.

The U.S. may need to build 250 power plants of 1,000 megawatts each, about 25 percent of the current capacity, to meet electricity demand by 2030, Saifur Rahman, a professor at Virginia Tech College of Engineering, said in an interview today. Electricity networks equipped with so-called intelligent meters may help to cut energy use and halve that need, he said.

“Power plants need water, land and access and the target cannot be achieved, and there’s pressure on utilities to keep capacity flat,” Rahman said. “Half of the new capacity can be achieved with energy efficiencies and managing demand.”

The $787 billion U.S. stimulus legislation signed into law in February includes $4.5 billion for “smart-grid” technology, which aims to lower energy costs and prevent disruptions with systems that allow energy providers to communicate. General Electric Co., IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are investing in the grid communications market, which is estimated to reach $20 billion annually over five years.

It will cost $697 billion from 2010 to 2030 to add 214 gigawatts of generation capacity, according to the Brattle Group, a consultant. Based on that report, adding 250 gigawatts may cost $800 billion. The U.S. has more than 1,000 gigawatts of capacity.

Italian Grid

In Italy, the installation of 30 million so-called intelligent meters last year cost about 2.2 billion euros ($3.1 billion), the first time an entire country has been populated with such meters, said Rahman, who spent a year at Tokyo Electric Power Co.

The project may be viable because Enel SpA, Italy’s biggest utility, could save on employing people to read meters, he said.

Developing Asian nations including India and China may be slow to adopt intelligent metering compared with developed nations because the system requires broadband access in every home, appliances embedded with sensors that monitor usage and citizens receptive to such technology, Rahman said.

New Technology

South Korea agreed with the U.S. in June to develop technology for a smart grid network. China, the world’s second- largest energy user, may spend as much as 680 billion yuan ($100 billion) on such intelligent networks from 2011 to 2020, Huang Shouhong, an analyst at Essence Securities Ltd., said in May.

China State Grid Corp., the nation’s biggest power distributor, plans to build a smart grid by 2020, company President Liu Zhenya said in May.

The cost of installing smart meters may be a deterrent to some individual consumers as the savings accrue over a longer duration, Rahman said.

GE, the world’s biggest maker of power-plant turbines, Cisco and FPL Group Inc.’s Florida Power & Light Co. are creating a “smart” metering system in Miami, costing $200 million, with possible help from the U.S. federal stimulus funding, they said in April.

Miami marks the first comprehensive “smart grid” project in the U.S., Rahman said. The project will deploy more than 1 million advanced wireless meters to every home and most businesses in Miami-Dade County.

New-generation power grid systems will monitor meters and substations to manage demand for power and help identify outages. It can move intermittent power sources such as wind energy from remote locations to where it’s needed.

Customers can go online and check how much energy they have used by the month, day or hour and make decisions on consumption.