Between the Poles

Smart grid requires the next generation of convergence: real-time, geospatial and network analytics

At the Space-Time Insight annual SI World conference this year, Dave Haak of Accenture gave a riveting overview of the research that Accenture has conducted on smart grid deployment including a survey of utility executives in Europe and North America.  Some fundamental questions that Dave was able to shed some light on are

1. Is smart grid here to stay or is it a passing fad ? 
2. Is smart grid expected to reduce the cost of maintaining the grid in 2030 ?
3. How do you manage the complexity of the modern distribution grid ?
4. Is the electric power utility industry entering a disruptive phase ?

Managing the smart grid

Dave discussed the complexity of the modern grid which has to support distributed generation including intermittent renewable energy sources like solarPV and wind, energy storage, PEVs,  and potentially microgrids.   Monitoring and managing the modern complex grid is a challenge that traditional tools that have been used for the current grid such as traditional GIS are simply not capable of.  A new "converged" approach that tightly integrates GIS, intelligent grid analytical tools using grid topology (what's connected to what) and visualization, all in real-time, is required.  It needs to integrate traditional IT systems (GIS, CIS, work management, financials, and meter data management) and traditional OT systems (outage management, distribution management, SCADA, and energy management).  Accenture points out that Other industries such as telecommunications, retail and banking have gone through a similar disruptive phase and have applied IT including embedded analytics to transform their business processes to improve productivity.

Is smart grid here to stay ?

98% of respondents in Accenture's executive survey said that smart grid is a natural extension of the ongoing upgrading of the grid.  In other words this is not a flash-in-the-pan fad that will go away.  The evolution of grid operations is going to involve a broad change to how utilities are organized and how they operate.  Accenture predicts that it will require a major overhaul of utility organizations and will affect operational groups, as well as information technology and security.

Staffing the next generation utility

It also requires development of new skills, either through hiring new staff or retraining existing staff.  This is a key part of the challenge.  I have blogged on multiple occasions about the challenge facing the electric power industry as the older generation retires and a younger, but inexperienced workforce takes their place.  Accenture reports that utilities are finding it difficult to staff their workforces with the necessary combination of power engineering and IT skills.

Grid reliability and resilience

As the world becomes more dependent on IT solutions in our daily lives from point of sales to hospital admissions, reliability of the electric power network has become increasingly important.  A few years ago 40% of U.S. power went to chip technologies.  By 2015 this is expected to reach 60%.  Reliability of electric power supply varies significantly among countries.  For example, the duration of outages (SAIDI) in the U.S. is greater than the UK, France, or Italy and much greater in the than Germany.  I was not happy to see that Canada's average outage duration is over twice that of the U.S and 20 times that of Germany.

A major challenge facing utilities as they move to the smart grid is how to achieve better reliability (and reduced emissions) with less cost.  Accenture asked executives whether smart grid would reduce the cost of maintaining the grid in 2030.  72 % of respondents said that that expected that the costs of upgrading/maintaining the grid will be less in 2030 as a result of the adoption of smart grid technologies. 

Smart grid business drivers in different regions

There are significant differences between different regions of the world in the priority business drivers for smart grid deployment. For example, in Brazil and India the primary driver is non-technical losses.  According to the Accenture survey in North America the primary drivers for smart grid are improving grid reliability and outage response.  In Europe where climate change is taken more seriously, distributed generation and support for renewables are priorities.

Increasing competition from microgeneration

Accenture's view is that the industry is experiencing a disruptive phase.  Technologies such as distributed generation, storage, EVs and microgrids have the potential to impact competition and regulatory models in a fundamental way over the longer term.

In every part of the world decreasing solar PV prives combined with cheaper storage are beginning to displace centralized generation. This is changing the economics of the traditional electric power business model based on the existing, centralized power networks.  Accenture argues that if consumers are given a cost-effective option to move off the grid (for example, grid parity of coupled solarPV and storage), utility revenues will be at risk.

Utilities under threat from PV and other microgeneration technologies will need to look at novel strategies to develop new sources of revenue and integrate new distributed  generation capacity while maintaining quality and security of supply. 

23% of respondents said that they expected their utility would have a significantly different business model by 2030.  For example, incentivizing consumers with microgeneration capacity to stay on the grid or developing and maintaining microgrid solutions on behalf of consumer groups.

Other areas of competition

The Accenture 2013 Executive survey indicates a substantial degree of competition from new entrants is expected even within the next 5 years.  Respondents saw increased competition in the following areas:

• 85% - beyond the meter energy efficiency and demand response
• 85% - distributed generation
• 85% - data-related services (using customer electric power usage data). 
• 67% - demand-side aggregation
• 58% - PEVs and charging infrastructure
• 57% - smart meter services
• 52% - microgrid development and operations
• 48% - Embedded (distribution) energy storage
• 46% - Power electronics h/w and services
• 43% - Last-mile deployment

While increased competition in areas such as distributed generation and demand aggregation is widely expected, respondents expect competition to increase even in the core distribution business including embedded energy storage, power electronics hardware and services and last-mile network deployment.

The changes that are required are fundamental and a majority of the respondents said that legislative and regulatory change will be required.

Data management

The telecommunications, insurance, and other industries view IT as a strategic asset, whereas utilities still treat it as a cost centre.  Utilities are under invested in data management technology which does not position them well for the rapidly increasing volume of data and the competitive environment that they are beginning to experience.  96% of the utility executives that Accenture surveyed said that data management will be critical or important for managing the complexity of the network. Some industries are taking data management very seriously.  A survey of 600 companies revealed that 66% of them have appointed Chief Data Officers.

Convergence and Analytics

The area where respondents saw the most value from analytics was grid operations (96%). Being able to use visualization and analytical tools to monitor and manage complex modern networks which include distributed generation, storage, PEVs, and potentially microgrids is the first priority in both Europe and North America.  This where the next generation of "converged" analytical tools that integrate GIS,  artificial intelligence, grid analytical models that take account of network topology, and visualization tools and can operate in a real-time data streaming environment are required.

Outage management (93% in NA) and asset management (92%) were the next priorities in NA.  In Europe the next priorities were asset management (92%) and volt/var analytics (83%).

In 2009 12% of the companies surveyed were using predictive analytics.  This had risen to 33% in 2012.  But the same year 60% of internal customers surveyed said that they wanted predictive analytics.

In the specific area of AMI, Accenture's analysis suggests that the value of using smart grid analytics to transform operating results conservatively could approach  $40-$70 per meter per year.  Financial benefits of this order provide a strong motivation for companies to use modern grid analytics to drive change in business processes.

McKinsey identifies renewable energy and energy storage as disruptive technologies

McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has identified 12 technologies that could cause large-scale economic disruptions in the future.  MGI estimates that the 12 technologies combined could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025.

1 Mobile Internet $3.7 - 10.8 trillion
Wieless, small devices, advanced displays and batteries

2 Automation of knowledge work $5.2-6.7 trillion
Artificial intelligence, big data, natural user interfaces

3 Internet of things $2.7-6.2 trillion
low-cost sensors, wireless and near-field comms devices like RFID

4 Cloud $1.7-6.2 trillion
Virtualization, metering, data-center h/w, high-speed networks, SaaS

5 Advanced robotics $1.7-4.5 trillion
Computer vision, sensors, advanced robotic dexterity, sensors

6 Autonomous/near-autonomous vehicles $0.2-1.0 trillion
Artifical intelligence, computer vision, advanced sensors (radar, LiDAR, GPS), m2m comms

7 Next-generation genomics $0.7-1.6 trillion
Advanced DNA sequencing, DNA-synthesis, big data and analytics

8 Energy storage $0.1-0.6 trillion
Battery technologies, pumped hydro/compressed air, advanced materials/nanomaterials

9 3-D printing $0.2-0.6 trillion
Selective laser sintering, fused deposition modeling, stereolithography, direct metal laser sintering

10 Advanced materials $0.2-0.5 trillion
Graphene, carbon nanontubes, nanoparticles, smart materials (piezoelectric materials, memory metals, self-healing materials)

11 Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery $0.1-0.5 trillion
horizontal drilling, fracking, microseismic monitoring

12 Renewable energy $0.2-0.3 trillion
SolarPV, wind turbines, concentrated solar, hydroelectric and ocean-wave power, geothermal

Coupled solar PV and energy storage systems projected to reach $2.8 billion by 2018

I blogged recently about SolarCity's plan to develop a system with partners that will combine Tesla Motors’ vehicle battery system with SolarCity solar systems to create a combined photovoltaic (PV) and stationary storage product which can be installed in homes and businesses. The battery storage would collect excess PV power production so that at night or during peak periods, consumers or even utilities could pull from battery storage rather than CO2 emitting power plants.

Lux Research has released a report Batteries Included: Gauging Near-Term Prospect for Solar/Energy Storage Systems that projects that the coupled Solar and energy storage (lithium ion batteries) market will grow to $2.8 billion in 2018.  Lux projects that residential applications will be the primary driver through 2018 growing to 382 MW in 2018. It will be followed by the light commercial segment which is projected to reach 220 MW by 2018.  Most of the installations (95%) will be linked to the electric power grid.

Internationally Japan is expected to lead in coupled Solar and energy storage installations, reaching 381 MW by 2018.  Germany and the U.S. are projected to follow with 94 MW and 75 MW, respectively.

Government policies are being put in place to stimulate the energy storage market.  In 2013 Germany set aside $67 million to subsidize solar-tied energy storage and the U.S. Senate introduced a program that could fund $7.5 billion worth of new storage projects, or about 7.5 GWh of capacity.  Receblty the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has mandated energy storage procurement targets for Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Southern California Edison Company (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E) totalling 1.325 GW.

SolarCity working to integrate Tesla electric car batteries and rooftop solarPV

SolarPV in the U.S. becoming disruptive

I blogged previously about SolarPV being potentially disruptive in the U.S.  A presentation at this year's NRECA conference hit on a very sensitive topic among power utilties.  Companies like SolarCity, a full service solar PV energy company,  offer a financially attractive solar package (that does not involve the local power utility) once the power rate from the local utility reachs 14 cents/kWh or above.  Solar energy’s rapidly falling technology and operations costs have made it cost-competitive with power generated from fossil fuels in a growing number of markets in the U.S. SolarCity's unique leasing plan eliminates upfront costs for SolarPV.  It offers a flat rate for 20 years, and payments are made against savings from the monthly utility bill. 

It turns out that SolarCity is the biggest provider of solar power systems in the U.S.  The company says it expects to deploy 270 megawatts of solar systems in 2013.  It operates in 14 states and the District of Columbia, SolarCity also offers residential customers an energy storage option via an 8 kilowatt-hour battery system.  Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla is the company’s chairman of the board and its largest shareholder. SolarCity has financing partnerships with Google and Goldman Sachs and a bit of a different relationship with Honda.  Honda gets cost savings and green credibility by installing SolarCity systems at its dealerships and Honda and Acura car owners get a $400 discount on SolarCity systems.

This model is supported by research.  In a report by John Farrell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Rooftop Revolution: Changing Everything with Cost-effective Local Solar, the levelized cost of solar PV power is compared with the cost of power from local utilities.  The report conclues that right now solar PV delivers power more cheaply than the local power utility for 10% of residential demand in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. 

By 2022 it is projected, assuming continued decreases in the cost of solar panels, that solar power will deliver power more cheaply for 10% of residential demand in 49 states, the only exception being Washington State which has the lowest power rates in the United States.  Furthermore according to another report Commercial Rooftop Revolution, solar PV installed by businesses is projected to be competitive with at least 10% of commercial power demand in the United States by 2022.

SolarPV and electric car batteries

Industry has been looking for opportunities to use electric vehicle batteries to complement rooftop solar on the power grid for some time.  A fascinating study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) looked at the feasibility of using battery capacity in plug-in electric vehicles to mitigate imbalances from intermittent generation in the power grid. 

SolarCity is developing a system with partners that will combine Tesla Motors’ vehicle battery system with SolarCity solar systems to create a combined photovoltaic (PV) and stationary storage product which can be installed in homes and businesses. The battery storage would collect excess PV power production so that at night or during peak periods, consumers or even utilities could pull from battery storage rather than CO2 emitting power plants.

California expected to mandate investment in electricity storage

Under terms of state law AB 2514,  the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is instructed to adopt an energy storage procurement target.   The CPUC is expected to vote today on mandated energy storage procurement targets for Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Southern California Edison Company (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E) as well as by aggregators and electric service providers.

This would "establish a target of 1,325 megawatts(1.3 GW) of energy storage to be procured by PG&E, SCE and SDG&E by 2020, with installations required no later than the end of 2024, and sets a schedule for procurement of energy storage. The decision directs these utilities to file separate procurement applications containing a proposal for their first energy storage procurement period by March 1, 2014."

"This decision further establishes a target for community choice aggregators and electric service providers to procure energy storage equal to 1 percent of their annual 2020 peak load by 2020 with installation no later than 2024, consistent with the requirements for the utilities."

Oct 18 2013, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved mandating PG&E, SCE and SDG&E to add 1.3 GW of energy storage to their grids by 2020.

NRECA TechAdvantage: Local power company responds to growing competition from clean energy companies

When Judge Green broke up AT&T in 1984, the intention was to introduce competition into the long distance telecom industry. In the end it unleashed new technologies such as wireless, optical fiber, RF/coax, and satellite that made the telecommunications market highly competitive.  Subsequently these new technologies have made the old copper telephone system (POTS) legacy.  Maybe a similar thing is happening to the electric power industry.  In this case the first new technology is renewable energy.

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conference in New Orleans, Rod Nikula,  VP Power Supply at Wright-Hennepin Cooperative Electric Assn (WH) in Minnesota hit on a very sensitive topic among cooperative power utilities (and among municipal and investor-owned power utilties as well).

Increasing interest in renewables

Currenly there is 13 MW of solar PV capacity in Minnesota and thisis growing rapidly.  A cold climate with sun like Minnesota is better for solar PV than a warm one.  One speaker reported that a  PV array in Minnesota produces more electricity than the same size PV array in North Carolina.  

WH is finding a growing interest in solar PV among its membership.  A year or two ago a local broadcaster forecasted that in 10 years, 50% of the average home's power demand could be satisfied by solar PV.  That pronouncement got the attention of WH, because it would dramatically affect their revenue stream.  A survey by WH of its memberhsip found that while only about 10% of homes had some self generation capacity,  30% of homeowners said they were  interested in renewable energy.

Solar City

Looming on the horizon are companies like Solar City, a full service solar PV energy company that can offer a very attractive solar package that doee not involve the local power utility once the power rate from the local utility reached 14 cents/kWh or above.  Solar City offers a unique leasing plan that requires no money down.  It offers a flat rate for 20 years, and payments are made against savings from the monthly utility bill.  According to Rod Nikula, Solar City is taking 600 homes off the California power grid every month.  Mark Vogt, CEO of WH, put two and two together and concludes that "We better find a way to be in the home generation business,"  or face a serious drop in revenue.

WH is concerned that schemes like Solar City will affect rural areas more than urban, which would mean coops would be affected more than other power utilities.  Any coop with rates approaching 14 cents/kWh is at risk.  And with new EPA rules shutting down coal fired plants, whch are the primary source of power in Minnesota, rates are expected to go up.

Pilot community solar project

WH decided to pilot a Community Solar Project with partners such as Clean Energy Collective.  It provided a way for members who were interested in solar PV at a very low upfront cost (not quite as attractuve as Solar City's package) and in a way that was fully funded by members and required no investment from WH, except for hosting the PV arrays on their property.

The technical solution involved PV panels and batteries.  The batteries were an important part of the solution because they allowed WH to store solar generated power long enough to reduce the peak at 6 pm which effectively determines the rate that WH pays for the power it distributes.

The project involved 171 panels at 190 watts/panel,  The panels cost members $869/panel (after the Federal clean energy tax credit of 30%).  Members could buy several panels up to a maximum equivalent to their annual energy demand.  WH controls charging/discharging of batteries.

The pilot project was fully subscribed so the project clearly appealed to the membership.  But the downside is that WH doesn't generate any revenue from the pilot project. 

WH is planning a follow-on project which it hopes will be a win-win for the membership and for WH.  From WH's perspective it needs to find substitute revenue for the lost revenue due to the members' solar PV generation.  It is considering selling, installing, servicing, and financing solar PV equipment, offering a battery storage service, and other revenue generating options.

NRECA TechAdvantage: Modeling is the key to grid resilience

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is comprised of more than 900 electric coops in the U.S.  This is more than just an organization representing electric coops at the national level.  It also supports a very active technology research arm called the Cooperative Research Network (CRN) that supports collaborative research with the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, National Labs and others.

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conderence in New Orleans today, Dr Craig Miller, Project Manager at CRN gave a scintillating and inspiring presentation on the future of the U.S. power grid over the next two decades.

Four years ago when DoE received a large amount of ARRA funding, the focus was on the smart grid and the technology required to support it.  Now every utility has done something using smart grid technology.  The new focus is on resiliency, how to make the grid agile.  This is a lot more complicated today with our full quiver of smart devices. 

The foundation of the smart grid are sensors.  All electrical devices these days are smart and are able to report their status ranging from several times a microsecond to every 15 minutes.  The result is that utilities are faced with 100'000 times as much data as they've dealt with in the past.  The challenge is the analytics to make sense of all this data.

In the old days, when you had a fault, you dispatched a crew and a few hours or days later, the fault was fixed and people got power again.  Now the network can be reconfigured in subseconds.  But there are a lot more things to worry about.  When you reconfigure the network, you have to worry about whether the new configuration can support the load.  If it can't there a number of options you have that weren't available with the old grid.  You may be able to tap battery storage, autpmatically startup backup generators at industrial customers and take them off the grid, disconnect less critical customers, automatically shut down some devices for customers on demand response programs, reduce voltage, or even isolate some parts of the grid, so-called microgrids.  With the new grid, there are tools to manage load, generation, and storage dynamically, and since the grid is a balancing act, all of this has to happen at subsecond speeds.

Modeiing the power grid is the key to the engineering challenge of the 21st Century

Dr Miller's most important point is that the key to all of this is models of the power grid.  Being able to model the  network and predict what it will do faster than the network itself is seen as the key to the next generation "agile" grid, which Dr Miller predicts will be the greatest engineering achievement of the 21st C, much as the old grid was called the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th C.  Dr Miller pulled no punches when he said that our current models of the grid are all bad.  They are only able to be used for planning purposes, not for operations. 

Modeling the grid is a very complex problem.  Even our existing "simple" models are incredibly complex.  This problem will require the best of our current super computers, and will probably require another decade for this level of computing power to become affordable for utilities.  For example, a project that CRN is working on with DoE to improve modeling of the electric grid will use Titan, at 21 petaflops, the fastest super computer in the world today.  This is indeed a "challenge to light up our lives", especially the lives of the next generation of electric power engineers.

Largest North American battery park became operational in December 2012

The 24 MWh battery storage park developed by Duke Energy Renewables to store power generated by the nearby Notrees 153 MW wind farm in west Texas became operational in December 2012.  The project was announced in 2009 and is supported by a matching a $22 million grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE) which is part of the DOE Office of Electricity Distribution and Energy Reliability (OE) effort to modernize the electricity grid while enhancing security and reliability of the infrastructure.  The battery park is comprised of 24 one MWh modules.  All the electricity generated from the facility will be sold by Xtreme Power to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT).

Duke Energy is currently working with the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to determine how best to use the faciity in stabilizing the grid, either to dispatch stored energy to increase frequency or absorb energy to decrease it. 

Performance data will be collected from the battery storage system by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to help assess the broader potential for deployment of storage solutions. Sandia National Laboratory will analyze technical and economic data. The results will shared publically through the DOE Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse.

China announced a 36 MWh battery park in May 2012.

Distributech 2013: Comprehensive smart grid pilot being developed by Kansas City Power and Light with support from DoE

At Distributech last week I had a chance to sit down with Bill Menge, Director of Kansas City Power and Light's (KCP&L) Smart Grid Demonstration Project.  Kansas City Power & Light and its partners are demonstrating a comprehensive smart grid that includes most of the components commonly associated with smart grid including distributed generation, distribution automation, and customer empowerment.  Part of the demonstration area contains the Green Impact Zone, 150 inner-city blocks that suffer from high levels of unemployment, poverty, and crime. Efforts in the Green Impact Zone will focus on training residents to implement weatherization and energy efficiency programs to reduce utility bills, conserve energy, and create jobs.

Kansas City Power and Light (KCP&L) is an investor owned utility with a service territory stretching over two states (Missouri and Kansas) with a total of 830'000 meters.  KCP&L has a history of a progressive culture with the respect to new technology.  They were an early adopter of AMR in the mid 1990s.  They were also early adopters of digital outage management (OMS) and AM/FM/GIS.

The smart grid pilot is being supported by the Department of Energy. The total project value is $54 million, of which $24 million comes from a DOE SGIG grant.  The demonstration area consists of ten circuits served by one substation across two square miles with 14,000 commercial and residential customers. The pilot is taking place in Missouri with the support of the Missouri PUC, which is so interested in the technology that they have a full-time employee dedicated to smart grid.

The pilot is quite comprehensive involving most aspects of smart grid including smart meters; time of use pricing; electrical vehicle charging including 10 Level 2 charging stations; home area networks with Zigbee; residential and commercial rooftop solar PV (total of 180 MW capacity); an automated substation based on the 61850 standard; distribution automation including line monitors; smart buildings; electricity storage (batteries with a total of one MWh capacity); in-home display; a full range of back office systems including AMI, MDM, DMS, OMS, D-SCADA, data analytics, and DERM (automated demand response); and cybersecurity.

KCP&L were able to obtain special time of use rates for the pilot from the PUC of 6 cents/kWh off-peak and 34 cents/kWh peak (3-7 pm). 

The pilot also includes a significant public education component. An Innovation Center has been built which is designed to enable the public to see the main components of the pilot first hand.

The pilot was initiated in October 2010 when the first smart meter was installed.  It is expected that most of the components will be in place by the end of February of this year. The full system will be able to be tested in its entirety by the end of June.  The pilot is scheduled to run for two years during which time data will be collected and the costs and benefits of the system calculated.  KCP&L appears to have a very open mind about the outcome of the pilot, their feeling being that with this much new technology it is hard to predict what the benefits will be in advance.  Of course, Missouri is well known as the "Show me" state which may have something to do with it too.   They are tracking costs during the design and build process and will collect data during the two years of operation, after which the data will be analyzed and the results provided to KCP&L, the Missouri PUC and DoE. 

Worth watching !

New technologies can mitigate nationwide power grid blackouts like India's

Monday of this week about 370 million people experienced a power outage, though because outages are common in many parts of India, critical facilities like the Delhi Indira Gandhi airport, hospitals and police stations, and large commercial and industrial users had backup generators.

Then, on Tuesday, there was a 20-state blackout that cut power for between 620 and 680 million people, by far the largest blackout in history.  Only about 40 percent of power was back up by mid-afternoon on Tuesday.  At this point it is not clear what the cause of the outage was, but power grids are complex and this will take time.  I remember that it took months to determine what caused the Northeast power outage of 2003.

In some countries the grid is becoming much more flexible as a result of smart grid and distributed power generation technologies.  New technologies make it possible to restore power faster, track outages and restoration in real-time, and isolate sub-grids ("intentional islanding"), even at the home level, which can be kept them going with local power sources when the central grid goes down.  Home networks that incorporate renewable energy sources and power storage batteries enable homes to function off the grid.  In countries like Bengladesh with a limited central power grid, a significant amount of electric power is completly local and not connected to a central grid, which means that these power users are unaffected by a nation wide outage.

Monitoring outages and restoration

April of last year thirty tornados hit Alabama Power's operating area completely destroying two substations, flattening transmission pylons, breaking 7500 poles, and leaving 400,000 cutomers without power.  Fortunately, Alabama Power had installed more than a million smart meters in its service area.

By looking for smart meters that were read the day before and comparing them with the meters that could not be read after the tornados, Alabama Power was able to put together a detailed map of where power had been lost, without making telephone calls, which is what utilities normally do in such cases.  They could also tell emergency response officials whether the power was on or off in specific buildings - critical information that first responders need before entering a damaged building.  In addition, they could also track power restoration trends as customers started coming back on-line. The smart grid may not be able to prevent an outage caused by this type of event, but it can help get power restored faster and more safely.

The University of Tennessee Power Information Technology Laboratory has used a network of small, low-cost devices that plug into wall outlets to show the electric system dynamics of the Western Interconnect during the San Diego blackout in September of this year.  The devices record frequency, phase angle, and voltage every few seconds and transmit the data via the internet to the University of Tennessee and Virginia Tech. GPS-synchronization of the network made it possible to show geographically how the system disturbance propagated.

Intentional islanding

The combination of an intermittent energy source like solar or wind together with a large electric power storage battery (a 36 MWh battery park was recently commissioned in China) represents a source of power that could function independently of the central grid and provide power to a local community.  Intentional islanding can be used during a widespread outage like that in India to create power islands which can be designed to maintain a continuous supply of power locally during disturbances to the central grid.   Critical facilities like airports and hospitals already employ a form of islanding, taking themselves off the central grid and using emergency backup generators.

Home energy management

A large manufacturer, Panasonic Corporation, has announced that it will start mass-production of a lithium-ion battery energy storage system for homes, specifically for the European residential market.

The battery system consists of a battery cell with a capacity of up to 1.35 kWh and a battery management system designed to control battery charging and discharging.  When the sun is shining the battery stores energy generated from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. At night when the PV system is not generating power, the battery provides up to a kWh of power.

Decentralized electric power

In Bangladesh, renewable energy, primarily solar, is providing access to electricity for rural villagers, who are not likely to have access to the central grid in the near future.  The Globle Environment Facility (GEF) is helping to accelerate rural electrification through solar home systems (SHS) in rural areas where people live too far from the main electrical grids. The Renewable Energy and Rural Electrification project seeks to reduce barriers to the use of these climate friendly energy systems and grow the market for renewables.  Currently it is estimated that some 80,000 SHSs are installed each month and in the last seven years, over 1 million rural homes in off-grid areas have got electricity through SHSs.  Since SHSs are entirely off-grid, they are not affected by nationwide outages like that in India earlier this week.