EnergyBiz - January/February 2008 - (Page 40) LeaDeRshIP RoUnDtaBLes tion in our territory. There is potential legislation to promote net metering and there are a number of ways you can do net metering. But if there’s a different rate for “in” versus “out” and that means your system is going to have to measure two different rates, your meters are going to have to be updated to do that. And your billing is going to have to change because you’d have to bill for two cycles. So I see significant impact on your billing system and your receiving system as well as your rate structure. The other area which concerns me is if you have a lot of distributed generation, what does it do to the way you manage the network? How do you connect those and manage those in your network, The owners of these things are not going to go turn a switch on and off. When we need the generation, we’re going to have to be able to signal control, so communications is big and logic is big. EnErgyBiz Given the recent cancellations of a lot of coal-fired plants, do you see a need to solve the problems with distributed generation on an accelerated basis? carL sOn I don’t know if these things are solved with distributed generation. They’re solved with a combination of things. Demand-side management is a big initiative and I think we can contribute to it if we can find a way for it to be more elegant, less of a slam-it-on, slam-it-off approach. We have got a lot of wind on the system. Wind seems to be the biggest play right now from an investment standpoint. It just presents a problem in whether it is going to be blowing when the demand is? So battery technologies are a big piece of it or we’re expecting them to be a big piece of it down the road. Distributed generation is probably more of a vision as opposed to practical right now, from what we’re seeing. harknEss We’ll have enough time on the distributed generation side. I see us needing to be prepared for a combination of solutions. I think again PNM has a large investment on the wind side, but we’re also getting our feet wet on the solar side as well as the biomass side. I know we’ve been looking into more of the storage issues as well. We’re going to have time. I don’t see the industry making the same mistake it did before when everybody put all their eggs into the natural gas side of Mike Carlson the house. You’re going to see a lot better diversification of sourcing on the generation side. You really need to be open architecturally to allow for just about any possibility out there. which creates some challenges? You’ll figure out where your gaps are and develop more of a longer-term strategy to evolve to that longer-term place. harknEss I think the biggest thing that we can do to prepare for it is look at the infrastructure that we have in place from an IT perspective, and make sure we’re developing open-architected capabilities because you really don’t know where the legislation is going to take you. You really need to be open architecturally to allow for just about any possibility out there. carL sOn If it’s fixed distributed generation, that’s a more manageable model. We’re tending to look at distributed generation as being at least partially mobile. Not only do you have to be able to manage it from wherever it’s sitting on the grid, but you’re also going to have to integrate it into billing in the control side of it. If you assume a charge/discharge cycle, you obviously are going to want to be charging on the low end of the demand curve. So I think it’s going to be a lot more complicated at the end of the day with both the communications model and the logic structures. Technological breakthroughs EnErgyBiz What will be the next great technological breakthrough? carL sOn Meshing the communications infrastructure in the most cost-effective way to pull all this data together is critical. It’s still not a standard that we can just go pick off the shelf. Whether it’s a breakthrough, or whether it’s just somebody cobbling together what’s already there and then offering it so we’re not becoming telecom providers to ourselves is one. And the second is more of an automated, neural grid. It’s providing that data set to a decision maker and that’s why we get day-ahead and 12 hours, a real time model of interactive decision making. BrEMEr I’d start with communications. When I look at the main pain points of my budget right now and the drivers for work, communications is clearly number one. And that is not just from the mobile workforce. As we build out the AMI types of capabilities and SCADAs, we’re worried about security and real-time data and not losing data. That’s going to continue to be a problem, especially in the rural areas where you don’t really have a strong backbone by the current providers. We need to be able to get more flexibility in our applications and the ability to do upgrades and additions and modifications without taking entire systems down. We’re so tied together today to try to get the efficiencies on the end processes that if you want to do anything to any piece of the system, it almost feels like you have to get the entire company to agree to let you take a system out of service. Chuck Bremer Bob Arnett 40 E n E rgyB i z January/February 2008
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