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Smart Meters, smart grid

Technology to conserve energy is coming to B.C.
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Part I - Is B.C. Ready for Smart Meters?

B.C. Hydro is preparing to roll out smart meters in every home. The tech industry is ready to jump on board, but are government and citizens prepared?

By Colleen Kimmett

19 May 2010

TheTyee.ca

 

The Olympics were a key moment for David Helliwell and his start-up company, Pulse Energy . Eight venues, outfitted with Pulse energy monitoring technology, allowed visitors to view online how much energy was being used at those sites at any given time. It marked the first time that any Olympic site collected and reported energy consumption data, and it attracted a considerable amount of media attention as part of Vancouver's "Greenest Games" billing.

The high-profile project led to more lucrative deals for Pulse - Helliwell says the London 2012 Olympic organizing committee is now interested in tracking energy use at its venues - and also pushed smart meters into the public sphere.

The potential for business development around smart meter deployment is huge, says Helliwell and other industry experts. But as utilities roll out these programs around the world, they are being met with public opposition and concerns about privacy, reliability and cost.

Smart meters are coming to B.C. - but are we ready for them? And what can we learn from those jurisdictions that are ahead of the curve?

 

'We need to change our behaviour': Campbell

Smart meters are where consumers plug into the smart grid of the future . Smart meters relay real-time energy use data to utilities and customers, and can also communicate with home appliances, opening up opportunities for tighter demand-side management and increased conservation - especially during times of peak demand, when electricity is most expensive.

In 2007, Premier Gordon Campbell told delegates at the annual convention of the Union of B.C. Municipalities that within five years 1.7 million homes and businesses in B.C. would have a smart meter.

"We need to change our behaviour and when we do, we will all save money," Campbell said.

But the implementation never happened and smart meters fell off the public radar - until the Olympics and, not long after, the GLOBE conference on business and the environment. There B.C. Hydro's Bev Van Ruyven (now its executive vice-president) reiterated the province's commitment to smart grid technology and announced that Hydro would "substantially complete" its smart metering program by 2012.

 

Clean Energy Act 'changed the whole picture'

And not long after that, the provincial government released the Clean Energy Act, in which smart meters and smart grid infrastructure are a cornerstone. Not only that, but, under the act, these and other "marquee" energy projects do not have to obtain approval from the B.C. Utilities Commission.

This "changed the whole picture" for the industry, says Ludo Bertsch, president of Horizon Technologies . Bertsch has spent the last two decades designing smart grid hardware and software, and now mostly does consulting work.

"The B.C. Clean Energy Act was very important in that it laid out the foundation to say we are not going to pull it, we are going to move ahead with smart meters.

"Before, we were getting the message out there that this [smart metering] is important," Bertsch says. "But leading up, we were concerned that government was going to pull it. It's a lot of money."

B.C. Hydro has budgeted $660 million for the entire program. That includes the smart meters, telecommunications system, data management system, in home feedback tools and conservation rates.

 

Smart meter carrots and sticks

I f a smart meter is the carrot to encourage customers to conserve energy and shift time of use, rate structuring is the stick. B.C. Hydro's conservation rate , also known as a tiered or graduated rate, came into effect April 1, 2010. Under this rate, residential customers get, over a two-month billing period, 1,350 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity at 6.27 cents per kWh. Every additional kWh after that costs 8.78 cents.

Some utilities have also introduced peak pricing; during times of high demand, the cost per kilowatt hour is higher to encourage people to switch activities to off-peak times.

In 2006, B.C. Hydro launched an experiment in peak pricing with its two-year Advanced Metering Initiative. Roughly 2,000 households in the Lower Mainland, Fort St. John and Campbell River were set up with smart meters and monitoring software.

The goal, according to one B.C. Hydro report , was to "determine whether customers respond to pricing signals and information on energy use and to determine the magnitude of the responses."

In one test group, participants were charged 23.5 cents more per kWh for electricity used during peak hours (8 to 11 a.m. and 4 to 9 p.m.)

According to an executive summary of the first year of the project, residents in test groups used on average 11.5 per cent less electricity during evening peak periods compared to the control groups that had no difference in rates.

 

'1.7 million customers leads to a lot of business'

Part of Bertsch's work has been to help manufacturers respond to demand-side management by making appliances smart grid compatible. Whirlpool recently announced it will release one million "Smart Dryers" by next year, which will have the capacity to automatically shut off or go into no-heat mode during peak hours.

"This is huge," says Bertsch. "The industry in B.C. is starting to come to terms with the opportunities to come. There's going to be a huge industry installing (smart meters), implementing them, you'll have home automation, you'll have smart phones... 1.7 million customers leads to a lot of business."

Burnaby-based Clevest Solutions Inc. is supporting the deployment of more than 8 million smart meters in the US, China, Europe and Philippines.

Bill Lee, Clevest's marketing manager, says errors can happen when smart meters aren't deployed properly. When an old meter is swapped out for a new one, the existing billing information must be recorded correctly and the new meter must be correctly identified with the appropriate residence.

"Clevest enables field technicians to collect data and verify the installation before they leave the site," Lee wrote in an email to The Tyee. "With a single mobile handheld device powered by Clevest, a technician can perform a smart meter installation with a barcode scanning of meters, photo capture of old meters to verify last meter readings, and collect GPS coordinates of the installed meters."

When utilities are swapping literally hundreds of meters a day - as may be the case if B.C. Hydro is to achieve its smart metering goals - there is a lot of potential for error.

Just last week, California's PG&E issued an apology to customers for poor customer service related to the installation of its smart meters.

According to a report in the San Jose Business Journal , PG&E said it "would also begin posting weekly information on the number of smart meters having problems and will increase the number of "side-by-side meter tests" to 300, comparing data from old meters to new smart meters."

This was only after a group of citizens in Bakersfield, California launched a petition against and later sued the investor-owned utility, alleging they were overcharged.

 

Privacy, security concerns at forefront

Security is also a major concern with smart meters.

According to one security analyst report, smart meter networks are open to hacking , which leaves the grid vulnerable to attack and customers vulnerable to privacy breaches.

This is where federal government regulators must come in to develop smart grid standards, says Bertsch.

Bertsch sits on a newly-formed task force, part of the Standards Council of Canada, that is looking at how to address privacy, security and other issues, and is also involved with a smart grid task force in U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology.

"Privacy is a big one," he says. "In the states they are very concerned with privacy. It is a top issue that is being dealt with."

Although Canada has been "a little bit slow to the mark," its making progress as more smart grid technologies are deployed. As he sees it, where the U.S. goes, so goes Canada.

"Eventually, it's going to happen here," Bertsch says. "We have common links between our electrical systems, and you can't have that kind of action going on in the states, with that kind of money, and not follow it in Canada."

 

Part II - Here Comes the 'Smart Grid' Way to Save Power

The U.S. is investing billions in a wired feedback loop telling consumers how to be electricity misers. A B.C. firm is on the cutting edge.

By  Colleen Kimmett

13 May 2010

TheTyee.ca

 

Though pop culture credits Thomas Edison with inventing the light bulb, in reality it had been around for decades by the time he got his hands on it. Edison and his lab took it to the next level by creating a safe, practical and affordable system in which to put those bulbs in people's homes. His real contribution to society was the first electrical transmission grid, which in 1882 provided nighttime lighting for a few dozen customers in lower Manhattan.

Over the next century, transmission grids across North America grew to criss-cross the continent, until just about everyone was able to flip on a switch and have power and not have to think much about where it came from. Aside from getting bigger, this grid hasn't fundamentally changed much in the past century: meter readers still have to walk from house to house to bill customers, utilities often don't know about outages until someone calls it in.

But now, utilities and governments are rolling out smart grid technologies, the first wave in a virtual sea change of how we use and think about electricity.

Imagine a world in which you could switch off an oven with your cell phone while sitting on the Skytrain. Where washing machines run off electric vehicles plugged in at night. Where homes become not just consumers, but also producers of electricity, able to meet peak demands without bringing expensive new power projects online. All possible, with a smart grid.

The savings aren't just measured in your bank account. Cutting power consumption reduces greenhouse gases causing climate change, too.

 

'Smart grid,' defined

Smart grid is really a blanket term that covers many aspects of the modernization of the existing grid. These include highly technical aspects of monitoring and managing transmission and distribution components as well as advanced metering systems - or smart meters - that measure electricity use at its final destination.

The fundamental difference between a smart grid and a regular grid is that it turns our existing one-way electricity delivery system into a two-way system, one that communicates real-time information to utilities from points across the entire grid.

"The core of the smart grid is this: can we put a layer of intelligence on a built-up environment where electricity is the primary source of energy?" asks Hassan Farhangi, director of the Group for Advanced Information Technology (GAIT) at the B.C. Institute of Technology.

 

BCIT's student housing experiment

The answer is yes.

GAIT is helping create the Intelligent Micro Grid on BCIT's Burnaby campus. Farhangi calls it a "skeleton" grid at this point - a kind of blank slate for testing all kinds of smart grid technologies.

Now in the second year of the six-year project, they've installed smart meters at seven campus buildings and created a 'central control' station, where computers collect information from the smart meters (via power lines or wireless networks) and then spit it out in a way that the average homeowner would understand. (Like how much electricity they used when they came home and turned everything on, and how much it cost them.)

Central control can also talk, via the smart meter, to appliances in the buildings; it can turn the air conditioning down, for example.

And the smart meters can even communicate with each other - in fact, BCIT recently held a contest in which building residents compared electricity usage, and competed to be the most frugal. Faranghi recalls walking by the residences and seeing students studying with flashlights.

"Within two weeks, we were able to reduce electricity consumption by 20 per cent," he says. "It was amazing, absolutely wonderful."

This two-way communication is what, in effect, makes a grid smart, explains Farhangi.

With the regular grid, "we do not have any information whatsoever as to how much load do we have on our distribution network, what's the rate at which the consumption is moving, what are the areas that requires more feed and different type of distribution.

"Simply due to that absence of information," says Farhangi, "we have, over the past 100 years, over-engineered the system."

This has led to redundancies and waste. The grid is built for peak demand , but that demand isn't always there. During those times B.C. Hydro runs turbines at its hydroelectric dams backwards, dumping water back into the reservoir and introducing 20 to 25 per cent wastage on the system, says Farhangi.

"I believe the legacy of our existing electrical grid will basically evolve into a network of integrated, distributed micro grids," he says. "The old system is hierarchical. We need an evolutionary approach."

With more funding, and a small, nearby source of clean electricity and heat, the BCIT''s Intelligent Grid could become an "island" -- completely independent of the main grid. Farhangi sees this as the model for other dense and urban areas.

Creating market incentives for smart grids

Especially since the "layer of intelligence" that makes up a smart grid can be built on existing infrastructure. If there's a power outage, for example, and the transmission line is outfitted with sensors and networked communications capabilities, the utility would instantly know where and how to fix it. It even opens up the potential for self-healing software that could fix the problem without human intervention.

"You're going to have increased reliability, security, flexibility. You're going to be able to integrate renewable energy a lot easier. You'll have a more efficient system -- not just consumer energy efficiency, but grid efficiency," explains Katherine Hamilton, president of the Washington D.C.-based GridWise alliance .

GridWise is an industry advocacy group. Its goal is to "try to create market incentives for smart grids that allow everybody to participate, whether you're a large company or a small company."

"We think there's room for everybody in this because it is sort of a brand new technology area that we think is ripe for innovation," says Hamilton.

Hamilton says her organization lobbied hard - and successfully - for smart grid stimulus funding. President Barack Obama has made smart grid technology a pillar in his clean energy plan, and last year put $3.4 billion of federal stimulus funding into 100 smart grid projects across the country.

"It allows our state regulators to see projects being put in place that are 50-50 cost shared so that the state isn't putting the entire onus on their own customers," Hamilton says. "That cost-share with the federal government limits the risk and it's going to really prove out all these different technologies. We think that's a huge piece of it."

 

How Tantalus of Burnaby is wiring rural U.S.

Burnaby-based Tantalus Systems Corp. is one company taking advantage of this boom in the U.S. Most of its clients are publicly owned utilities in rural regions of the southern states. Tantalus provides complete systems: smart meters, sensor devices in transmission and distribution gear, and the wireless communications network.

Rob Lauridsen-Hoegh, manager of marketing and communications, says rural utilities were early adopters of their technology because of its practical applications. For example, customers at the very end of a distribution line can often experience spikes in power, which can blow appliances and fry computers.

"Tantalus is able to go in and in a matter of a day or a couple hours, remotely measure the power quality so the utility can make the necessary adjustments. That's a time-save and prevents the utility from getting sued or having to pay a customer for appliances that were lost," he says.

Theft detection is another obvious example. "We can measure how much power is going into a neighborhood and how much is being used. You can determine that some place within a range of houses is pulling power illegally off the grid," says Lauridsen-Hoegh. "One of our customers was able to find out several hundred thousands dollars worth of theft. That used to be hit or miss whether a utility was able to do it."

 

Customer education is key

Tantalus currently has no clients in B.C., and Lauridsen-Hoegh says only about 10 per cent of utilities across North America have deployed advanced metering systems. "But the industry is forecast for double-digit growth in the foreseeable future," he says. "I think B.C. is in a great position now because the technology has matured, benefits are proven, and people understand that changes to the way we use and manage energy are needed."

Social engineering is in fact a key component. You can't have a smart grid without a smart meter, and the information that a smart meter provides is useless unless customers know how to use it. In effect, the days of mindlessly turning on a light switch -- or any other appliance -- are gone.

"Right now, most people don't see energy as a commodity. They don't know how much it costs, they don't know what it's worth," Hamilton says. "They just get a bill at the end of the month, but they don't exactly know what they did to get it to that level."

This story was originally published by The Tyee (www.thetyee.ca) as part of a larger five-part story on B.C.'s energy future. Reprinted in Pique with the permission of The Tyee.

 

 

 



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