Energy Biz - July/August 2008 - (Page 37) daschbach Chacko Teetor eades ENERGYBIZ Many people are proposing visions of the intelligent utility enterprise and smart grid as partial solutions for many of the problems that the industry is facing right now, including demand explosion and supply constraints. Th is implies that utilities will become more real-time all the way from the grid to the boardroom. Is your utility working to link real-time data from the field with the enterprise systems to enable an intelligent utility? Ortega Yes. In the last year or two there’s been a lot of discussion around the smart grid. That term is pretty common at the table now and we’ve sat with many a vendor to discuss it. But it’s very much in the initial stages of what each is doing and where they are. One thing we’ve struggled with is who has the lead. Is it IT, operations, or engineering? Why isn’t engineering taking the lead? Is IT support for engineering? It’s all those kind of issues we’re discussing. Varn Six months ago, we started a formal group within the organization for an initiative called grid smart. We’re looking at several different ways to try to tackle some of the issues. There’s a group that works on self-healing distribution systems. Each one of the major groups within the grid smart initiative is headed by at least a director level and the executive sponsor is an executive vice president over the utility group who’s right next to the chair. r auber I think we’re in the same kind of mold of thinking about the intelligent utility. I don’t see it necessarily as being something new. Running grids and operating them are evolving. The utilities and the power systems can become more intelligent. Pushing real-time data to the back office probably will be farther down the road. chackO In March, we announced what we call our Smart grid City initiative in Boulder, Colo. We are planning to have about 10,000 to 15,000 smart meters in place by August. What we’re planning to do is convert two of our substations and five feeders into an import called a smart substation project. Also, at the invitation of customers, we’re going to be installing in-home programmable devices that we can, hopefully, use to fully automate home energy use. Our plan is to have this first phase done by August and then have the entire city on board and completed by the end of 2009. Then we will have conversations with the state, and the regulatory officials, to consider a potential larger deployment in the rest of our eight-state service territory. linahan We’re a small utility with 31,000 electric meters. We’re a customer-owned utility, very conservative. We’re always looking at the new technology and trying to pencil it out for a business case, but in many ways, it doesn’t work. The most we’ve been able to do is to look at automatic drive-by metering just from the standpoint of access issues, dog problems, safety, things of that nature. But to do a full deployment just doesn’t pencil out because we have over a thousand customers per square mile. ENERGYBIZ Is your organization focused on achieving greater reliability? www.energycentral.com e n e rgyb i z 37 http://www.energycentral.com
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