Special Report: 9.23.2009

Posted by TED Magazine on Tuesday, September 22, 2009

DAY 2@GRIDWEEK

What you can anticipate, as an electricity user

By Joe Salimando 

At any given industry meeting, you hear a lot of "stuff" -- and GridWeek  isn't any different. I have asterisks next to a number of statements from speakers at Tuesday's 10:30 and 1:30 sessions, and you'll read (and probably learn from and enjoy) some of what's below. By the way, if you missed Day One's post (all about Energy Secretary Chu's remarks) please go here to catch up! 

SHOCK OF SHOCKS: Customers Like 'Smart' Deals

Baltimore Gas & Electric ran an experiment over the past two summers -- 1,000 customers were given a "smart" deal. This was done, it seems, to test out whether residential customers will respond to time-of-use notifications and discounts. Over a summer, there were 12 days identified in which customers were asked to reduce power use between the hours of 2pm and 7pm. The customers were guaranteed their rates wouldn't go higher. The average rebate earned by participants in the program was about $100. Here's a surprise: People in Baltimore LIKE getting $100 discounts! 97% of them said they would do it again, if BG&E offered (makes you wonder about the other 3%, doesn't it?).

Here's the kicker: Some of the customers were given an "Energy Orb" -- a big ball, basically -- to plug into one of their outlets. When the orb glowed green, there were no rebates. But when it glowed red, they were supposed to reduce energy use. This seems weird to me: Do you know anyone who can spend time in life (even retirees) staring at an orb, waiting for it to change color?

Xcel's Smart Grid City' = Boulder

Tom Casey of CURRENT Group was asked to talk about the group's work with Xcel on the smart grid city of Boulder, Co. Bottom line: It turns out that, properly implemented, the technology can enable a utility to realize 3% to 5% savings in T&D losses. This sounds pretty good, if you're a utility!

Names For The Customer

While a lot of the audience and speakers were from the utility industry -- if not with electrical utilities at this minute, these people once worked for the companies, and now are consultants or vendors to them -- they didn't betray too much arrogance, I didn't think. And the contempt for the rest of us was held to an absolute minimum. But sometimes they slipped.

One speaker (who will remain nameless) noted that the end user "was not just a ratepayer but a load point, where we drop off our load."

Now, how does that make you feel?

Eco Warrior In Video Game

Adrian Tuck of Tendril spoke about a number of things, but what unplugged my ears was the idea of working energy conservation into a video game. He would not name the company creating the game, but the idea is: The video game will monitor (somehow) your family's efforts to save energy. As a result of increased energy savings, the key character in the game (an "eco warrior" of sorts) will GAIN POWER . . . or not. This sounds great, but Tuck -- who appeared to have a sense of humor -- noted that you might leave your kids home and, upon returning, discover that they had unplugged all of the appliances!

Below, Tendril's booth at the GridWeek trade show (which includes table tops, booths like this, and company "exhibits" in suites in the Reagan International Trade Center (downtown D.C., a few blocks from The White House).

WHAT'S GOING ON IN AUSTIN

. . . seems like a lot!

Andrea E. Carvallo of Austin Energy was easily my favorite speaker on the day. His company is a municipal utility. Why? One set of remarks by him made me understand the NEED for The Smart Grid (beyond all of the hype, hope, federal billions, etc.). Here's how it boils down:

1. Austin Energy has 1,000 roofs with solar PV on 'em right now (2009). By 2015, it expects a lot more . . . perhaps 15,000 or maybe 50,000 (I did not hear him clearly).

2. Electric vehicles (PHEVs) are coming. Austin doesn't have a lot of them now, but AE estimated that 12% of its forward-learning population will be PHEV drivers in 2015. There are 800,000 cars in the city. Discounting any increase, that's 100,000 PHEV owners who will be expecting to recharge their batteries each night via the utility grid.

3. Gratuitous reminder: 2015 isn't all that many years from now. AE faces a number of problems. For example: When all of those solar roofs are generating electrons and backfeeding them into the grid, everything might well be fine. But what happens when a dark cloud passes overhead?

Obviously, customers might well expect the utility to have something in reserve to make up for the sun's mini-vacation. But the utility can't well maintain a 7x24x365 "spinning reserve" -- it will cost a fortune. BUT: According to Carvallo, it costs the utility a fortune per megawatt-hour to buy power on an emergency basis from ERCOT, the local power source.

Quite a sticky wicket that, eh?

4. Interestingly, about half the homes in AE's service area -- 86,000 -- have smart thermostats installed. This is voluntary. There are two programs: The utility can take 10 minutes of power out of every hour (in order words, AE can turn off your air conditioning for those 10 minutes); and another program that allows the ute to turn the power off for longer. This allows the power company to meet demand peaks in summer without buying power (remember that number, $2,700?).

5. There's another program for folks who don't want to take the thermostat and have the power interrupted at the utility's will. Customers who volunteer for this program give AE their e-mail addresses. When the utility anticipates a problem one day ahead, it sends these customers an e-mail -- asking them to voluntarily reduce their power use the next day.

Not only does this actually work, but Carvallo pointed out the change it marks -- going from a time, a few years ago in Austin (and to this day in many places), where the only communication one received from the local power company is a BILL, which comes like clockwork 12 times a year. Suddenly, customers are getting e-mails from their utility.

Speaking of solar, the company whose tabletop is pictured below, Petra Solar, not only exhibited at the GridWeek show, but is sponsoring tomorrow's (Wednesday's) lunch.

CALIFORNIA FALLS INTO THE SEA . . . ON PURPOSE?

33% renewables by 2020, or bust

Steve Berberich of the California Independent System Operator Corp. spoke and charmed the audience with his firm words, in which he identified himself as, essentially, filling the roles played by a CIO and CFO. Which made it his job, he said, to come up with neat new ideas -- and then to tell himself "No!"

If you're not from California, this will be news: The state had a goal of getting to 20% renewable energy by 2010. It's going to miss it, Berberich said -- but come back and hit it by 2013. Now, The Terminator (the governor!) has signed an executive order imposing the next goal, which is 33% by 2020.

No one in the audience swooned, but in previous sessions at this event, it had been widely bandied about that getting to a figure like 33% with renewables -- essentially, sun and wind -- was going to be a big problem. Why? This stuff just isn't reliable. There have been (in just two days) a number of charts slapped up on the wall showing drastic drops in power output when the sun goes behind a cloud (or, you know, disappears and that other sky thing comes out and it gets dark) . . . and when the wind stops blowing (which, I heard in one session, it can do suddenly and sustain for a full week sometimes).

In fact, another speaker said in another session, in Denmark they have wind power = to 20% of the country's energy needs -- in country. But (this speaker said, and he seemed to know) . . . Denmark THROWS AWAY 70% of those wind-generated electrons.

Back to California: What is going to happen in the state when renewables get to 20%, much less 33%? Big ramps up and down, Berberich said. Folks, it's the job of the ISO to ensure power is available and reliable. So he's been thinking about what to do on these "ramps" -- when suddenly there's a lot of solar PV electricity available, and then it goes away - and, of course, ditto with the wind.

Berberich said something about keeping 800 mW of power handy to meet sudden needs -- about twice what the state has now -- and then indicated this probably wouldn't be enough.

What's the solution to all this? ENERGY STORAGE. Berberich said that 5% of the state's peak load (remember, this is the state that's got 36.5 million residents, and a lot of food-processing plants, and Silicon Valley, and so forth) will be met via storage by the year 2020.

Wait? What kind of storage? Well, there's hydro storage (those dams that Secretary Chu talked about yesterday) -- but, Berberich said, his state would probably have an environmental problem with doing that on a massive scale. There's also compressed-air storage. But Berberich seems to favor battery storage . . . except for the fact that, he said, it was going to cost $2,700 a megawatt to use it.

SOME SEMI-FINAL THOUGHTS . . . Temporarily; For Now Anyway

A couple of thoughts which might provide perspective, before we move on (in about 24 hours or so) to what happened on Wednesday:

1. California is important in TSG world. Not only is it darn big, but the major utilities in the state (PG&E, Southern California Edison, and the San Diego people working under the bogus name Sempra) are ahead of most of the rest of the country in TSG adoption.

2. While watching a panel discussion in the press room, it struck me that the moderator was a venture capitalist, one speaker was from GE, another from Cisco Systems, and a third from a company funded by a defense contractor. The topic was TSG's "business and consumer opportunities." I'm not casting aspersions on these folks; I'm hoping that you'll understand that, with such people vitally interested in what's going on here, there obviously is BIG MONEY to be made in TSG. Or so these people rather obviously think!

3. At least two speakers that I've heard in the past two days have noted that there is no hard-and-fast definition of TSG . . . or that it seems to mean different things to different people. That may seem "bad" -- but maybe it just means that the "thing" itself is still evolving. For example, yesterday Secretary Chu (and one year ago, his predecessor, Spencer Abraham) talked about extra-high voltage (EHV) power lines. Is that part of TSG? I would say no.

People on Tuesday talked about monitoring transformers in substations. Xcel's Boulder project has identified seven potential power outages (due to monitoring of substation equipment and transformers) -- and customers have NOT experienced a single one of these, as each was prevented. Others talked about the power system as if it is in the process of becoming another Internet; the lady from Cisco talked about the substations as core routers (or something like that, she spoke fast and I couldn't get it down fast enough).

Now, doesn't all of that sound, at least . . . smart?