Public Power - June 2008 - (Page 58)

Investing in the Smart Grid years, and expects to have more than 500,000 smart meters installed by the end of this year. “This means that by March 2009, Austin Energy can fairly claim to have installed the first smart grid ever,” said Andres Carvallo, Austin Energy’s chief information officer. Carvallo is the dynamic upcoming chairman of the Large Public Power Council’s CIO Task Force, which he intends to make the strategic core of smart grid development in public power. “All LPPC members are aware of the potential and are beginning to collaborate. As I take over as chairman, I will share our journey at Austin Energy. I expect things to accelerate.” By making his case based on a healthy return on investment, the payback on smart grid investment at Austin Energy has been fairly quick, on the order of 24 months, said Carvallo. The savings come from every aspect of the business. “We are optimizing production, optimizing inventory, minimizing maintenance cycles, reducing truck rolls, monitoring everything, and managing load. With better operations, we will expect to have cut our fuel costs by 2 to 5 percent,” he said. Austin Energy also manages the thermostats of 65,000 customers wirelessly. “Our customers love it. They want us to come into their homes and manage their appliances,” said Carvallo. “The biggest challenge we now face is in the design of new appliances. Appliances in the future will need to work with two to three different standards that support both power line carrier and wireless communications protocols. However, appliance manufacturers are very reluctant to add more base cost to their products.” With enough market pull, he said he believes they will come around. Austin Energy just began a year-long town hall-type process to get community input on how to meet load growth for the next 10 to 15 years. “We need roughly 600 MW of capacity, and as a vertically integrated utility, we can add coal, nuclear, wind, solar, fuel cells or biomass, on top of energy efficiency. The smart grid is key to integrating distributed resources,” said Carvallo. With electricity demand growing 3 percent per year in the greater Phoenix area, Salt River Project has an ambitious program 58 JUNE 2008 to deploy AMI. SRP already has more than 250,000 smart meters in service, and is adding 10,000 per month. “Metering has already proven itself from a business case, and our goal is to have all of our customers equipped with smart meters in the near future,” said SRP’s Joe Nowaczyk, manager of electric systems. Their meters are primarily for automated meter reading, and remote turn-on and turn-off. SRP has a request-forproposal out for a demand response program—its ultimate goal. Based upon SRP’s experience with its pre-payment program, staff members expect a favorable reaction to demand response. “M-Power,” with 43,000 customers, is the largest pre-payment program in North America. Display units allow customers to see how much electricity they are using in real-time as appliances go on and off. Awareness, alone, leads consumers to save on average 10 to 12 percent of their electricity bill and surveys show very high satisfaction with the service. SRP also works with EPRI to develop a roadmap guiding comprehensive smart grid implementation. “We formed a cross functional team, hired EPRI, and inventoried all the smart grid technologies we currently deploy,” said Nowaczyk. “We are not as integrated as we would like to be, and this roadmap will help us leverage our current assets and strategically invest in new assets. We are lucky to have in place a very large fiber optic network. This is our basic platform. As we build on it, our smart grid will allow us to create value all the way from a self-healing system to providing customer services.” The self-healing delivery system Nowaczyk describes includes monitoring and automated control of substations and distribution feeders, and further upstream, the use of phase-angle measurements to improve grid operations. Advanced control and coordination in power systems operations—“Phasor measurement units” (PMU) provide a high level of situational awareness, analogous, in some respects, to the radar screen used by air traffic controllers. “Wide-area visibility and therefore coordination capability increases tremendously,” said Bruce Fardanesh, the New York Power Authority’s program manager, research and technology development. PUBLIC POWER http://www.assocsys.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - June 2008

Public Power - June 2008 Contents Perspective 10 Questions Finding Common Ground on Climate Change Solutions A Patchwork Approach to Renewable Energy Whose Grid Is It Anyway? The Little Utility That Could Benchmarking Customer Service Can Prairie Hay Power Your Town? Storming the Control Room Investing in the Smart Grid Coming of Age: Superconducting Cables Community Broadband Economic Development Customer Service Human Resources For Governing Boards Safety Parting Shot

Public Power - June 2008

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