POWER August 2013 - 48

SMART GRID AWARD
in advance in order for the service to come
to their neighborhood because it is available
throughout the service territory. Most customers
are connected at the beginning speed
of 50 Mbps (available a la carte for $57.99/
month); other residential and business customers
subscribe at 100 Mbps, 250 Mbps,
and 1 Gbps speeds.
Net Benefits. The fiber network that
enables fast Internet plus high-quality TV
and phone service has paid $57 million to
the electric utility so far in allocations and
access fees. That is the equivalent of a 4%
rate increase for EPB Electric Power customers
(both business and residential) that
did not have to happen, Bailey noted. Every
residential customer in EPB's service territory,
regardless of whether they subscribe
to EPB Fiber Optics services, has realized
savings of roughly $330 in their electric
rates since 2009.
" Based on a conservative estimate, the
EPB Fiber Optics brand will pay the EPB
Electric Power brand an average of $24.1
million per year going forward, " Bailey said.
Reductions in outage duration, improved operational
efficiencies, and revenue from the
sale of communications services result in an
average annual payback to the electric utilStructural
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ity and the Chattanooga area community of
$84.6 million.
What's more, EPB has had companies
say they relocated to Chattanooga in part because
of its smart grid efforts and reliability.
Clearly, EPB's smart grid has been a boon for
customers, the community, and the utility.
Forging New Customer Relationships
with a New Business Model
The smart grid deployment and new fiberoptic
communications offerings have affected
customer relationships in several ways,
" from the obvious to things we didn't even
consider while we were planning the project, "
Wade noted. EPB has not only had to
learn how to build and operate an entirely
new system but also learn how to be " a sales
and marketing organization in addition to our
traditional role as a technology and service
organization, " he said.
Another big shift that EPB planned for
abt. power feb 13:Layout 1 5/31/13 3:56 PM Page 1
was transitioning from a business in which
all of the work takes place outside of the
customer's home or business " to an environment
where we would be spending
several hours inside customers' homes and
businesses to set up their communications
services. We were vigilant in training our
installation teams on customer service, behavior
inside a customer's premise, attire,
cleaning up after themselves, etc. It was
well worth the effort, as we now hear more
customer praise about our installer teams
than anyone else in the company. "
The ability to provide new information and
more of it was expected, but the benefits of
that information sometimes are unexpected.
Keel shared the example of a call from " an
angry industrial customer whose equipment
had tripped, shutting down production. In the
past, we would have had to install monitoring
equipment to watch for another anomaly
before we could determine the problem. Today,
our 1,200 smart switches capture waveforms.
We were able to pull the waveform
data and show this industrial customer that
their equipment was reacting to a dip in voltage
for one cycle that resulted from a fault
on a 161 kV loop several miles and voltage
levels away from the site. Appreciative of
the quickly available data, the customer reconfigured
the equipment to a less-sensitive
setting, reducing the probability of another
similar incident. "
In 2012, EPB began offering online energy
monitoring options for large industrial customers,
and in 2013 it began offering online
viewing of interval meter data to residential
and business customers, an updated demand
response program for commercial/industrial
customers and time-of-use rates. As EPB
partners with Bell Labs, it is looking for even
more ways to leverage its data for customer
advantage, including:
■ Improving voltage delivery to customers.
■ Being able to inform customers that their
usage is outside of normal (for example,
if a heat pump fails), thereby saving the
community from costs associated with unnecessary
usage. (EPB estimates it will be
able to help customers save 20 million to
30 million kWh annually.)
■ Providing customers with a predictive
look at future usage, so that they can plan
to do something about it (if they choose),
versus looking at historical usage that is
too late to change.
■ Aiming to improve on the current average
50% reduction in outage duration by using
data to eliminate the other 50%, such
as with predictive analysis on pending
failures.
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POWER | August 2013
Congratulations to everyone at EPB Chattanooga
for demonstrating that it is possible
to engineer a smart grid program that delivers
both technology and economic benefits to
customers, communities, and utilities. ■
-Gail Reitenbach, PhD is POWER's
managing editor.
http://www.appliedbolting.com http://www.powermag.com
POWER August 2013

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