Part 3: Smart Metering and Delivery
Part 3 from the article, “GE And Google Announce ’21st Century’ Electricity System”
The third and most talked about component of the “Smart Grid” is centered around the Meter. Let me first say that the meter is the cash register of a Utility, and they treat it as such. Let me also say that ‘smart’ meters have been around for 10+ years. The initial motivation to put in meters that were digital and could send meter ‘reads’ back to the Utility were done with an eye toward eliminating meter readers (reducing manual labor, effort and costs). These early systems, however, were one-way and again one-dimensional. It simply enabled a monthly meter read without a human going out to read the meter. As the Utilities started to understand the benefits of these ‘smart’ meters, they realized that they needed smarter ones. There are a lot of functions that these smart meters could do if they could communicate 2 ways, send more data, and do it more frequently. Check out Aeris Communications for an overview of Smart Metering.
Key functions that are now being automated through these Gen2 Meters are: Outage Detection (usually they know your power is out when you call them), Remote Connect/Disconnect (when you don’t pay your bill, or move), and more frequent ‘reads’. Utilities plan their power capacity on macro looking, long term contracts, weather forecasts, and recent trendline information. However, since they only do reads once a month, the forecast data isn’t that accurate. If the Utilities could do millions of meter reads, say, every 15 minutes, imagine what better forecasting they could do. Considering that Kwh’s on the day ahead market can be priced many times that of Kwh’s on long term contracts, improving usage data from once a month to 96 times a day can mean much better efficiencies. These efficiencies equate to tons of carbon emissions and wasted energy, costing up to hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions) per year.
So, all this, and we’ve really only improved monitoring of devices and data to get these gains. Is there even more efficiency to be gained? In fact, there is. The next step is to “control” usage from a central location. This is called Demand Response. A very good website to read about DR is the Demand Response Research Center at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. These are systems that allow consumers to “opt in” to these programs for financial incentives. There are a myriad of models to these programs but essentially the Utility will pay you to reduce electricity usage when they need you to. By you reducing your usage, you are saving them from having to find and buy more power on the short term markets. In addition, under extreme conditions where the reliability of the grid itself is in danger, the ability for the Utility to turn off consumption in some key areas can mean the difference between blackouts or not.
So, whether we are talking about new and distributed Generation capacity sites, the fractured nature of the Transmission and Distribution Systems and substations, or the smart and smarter Metering infrastructures that are being deployed, the theme of data communications runs throughout. Next we’ll dive into the notion of how the communications networks, particularly wireless, is playing a major role in the deployment of this smart grid infrastructure.
Interesting paper!