So what are the pains in the electricity value chain?  There are three main actors in the value chain –governmental entities, utilities, and consumers – that feel pain.    

Governments have two specific pains that are addressed with innovations in the electricity value chain. First, the federal and state governments want to improve our energy security.  Second, they want to improve our economic security.  Both security concerns are answered by federal and state policies that encourage reductions in fossil fuels while simultaneously promoting development of domestic renewable energy sources.  Intelligent policies can reduce the role of oil in the US economy through the adoption of electric and other alternative fuel vehicles that don’t need gasoline and improve energy efficiency in traditional internal combustion engines.  The most recent policy action occurred last week with the California Air Resources Board’s (ARB) adoption of new clean car rules.  If you don’t realize the import of a state like California taking this step, just research the history of how car emissions were reduced across the country because of pioneering regulations in California. 

And the really good news is that stimulating new industries around the domestic production of renewable energy sources builds economic security in the form of jobs in America as well as energy security.  We can’t export the jobs required to set up and maintain the numerous wind and solar generation facilities springing up across America. We won’t need to deploy military resources to keep the sun shining and the wind blowing. 

Innovations that directly tie back to energy and economic security are not only painkillers, they are welcome cures for our current addiction to oil.  These innovations are found in electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energy and energy storage technologies.  However, these are not the only technologies that have potential to be painkillers as far as governments are concerned.  The federal government is also very concerned about cyber security and reliability of the electricity supply.  If you suffered through the great Northeast blackout in 2003, you will recall the pain of an unreliable electricity supply.  Important painkilling technologies focus on increasing the resiliency of the electrical grid, hence the current focus on deployment of advanced sensors called Phasor Measurement Units or PMUs to help monitor and control our transmission grids.  

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) are actively working to reduce risks of future blackouts due to unintentional (natural) or intentional (malicious) causes.  Solutions that reduce risk are painkillers for governments, as well as utilities and consumers too. 

Stay tuned for more exploration of innovations that are painkillers for utilities and for consumers. 

Are you ready to test your knowledge about electricity data and the privacy of that data?  And beyond Smart Grid discussions, as more devices are communications-enabled, the Internet of Things will produce enormous amounts of new data that can profoundly impact our privacy.  Here are a few questions:

1. Smart meters provide electricity data that lets utilities spy on consumers.  T/F 
2. My electricity data doesn’t have value to anyone but me.  T/F
3. A kilowatthour (kWh) can’t tell my utility exactly what appliances have been using electricity.  T/F
4. Utilities need to do more to ensure that my electricity data is protected.  T/F
5. The new Green Button initiative will
   1. Result in my electricity data being sold to the highest bidder
   2. Give me control over my electricity data and who may view or use it
   3. Automatically post my electricity data to my Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages.

Here are the answers. 

1. False.  While smart meters can communicate the amount of electricity that you are consuming in your home, special hardware and software that you install within your home is needed to disaggregate the stream of electrons flowing into your home and break it down to what flows to individual components.  A smart meter can offer a more time-granular view of electricity consumption, and that data could allow you to infer that spikes or declines in use correspond to operation of specific equipment  – particularly the biggest guzzlers like clothes dryers, pool pumps, and heating/ventilation/air conditioning (HVAC ) systems.   There are companies that take smart meter data and create suggestions to help you reduce electricity use, but those suggestions are based on inference and analytics comparing your usage against a peer group with similar variables for location, size of home, number of occupants, etc.
2. False.  Your electricity consumption data has enormous potential value to you and to others.  For instance, think about how your internet search data has value to advertisers.  Similarly, analysis of your electricity data could reveal information that would be valuable to businesses that want to sell products or services to you.  If you choose to share your data with a company in exchange for any value-added services, you’ll want to obtain a detailed description of exactly how they use that data, how they protect that data from unauthorized access, and if they want the ability to sell that data (anonymized or not) to others.   
3. True.  A kilowatthour is a unit of measurement that is one kilowatt of power expended in one hour.  It can’t tell you or your utility what that kilowatt was used for, anymore than the miles per gallon (mpg) metric can tell you or your friendly state trooper how fast you’ve been driving your car or where you’ve been driving it.  You could make inferences about the lavishness of your lifestyle by a monthly kWh consumption compared to a peer group.  But a kWh number won’t tell you or your utility how much electricity was spent chilling your 3000 bottle wine collection.  You can get that information if you install special devices, but the utility will never know.
4. True.  Smart meters do collect more electricity consumption data than dumb meters.  That data can help us recognize the true total cost of operation (TCO) for our equipment and our lifestyles.  Utilities must re-examine their existing policies and practices to ensure that they can securely communicate and store data needed to continue the safe, reliable, and cost-effective delivery of electricity.  We already have too many horror stories about how insurance companies and retailers compromise personal, medical, and financial information.  We don’t want to see utilities or third party service providers making similar errors with our electricity data.  See this blog for more information about ongoing activities to help utilities incorporate the policies and best practices to protect consumers’ electricity data.
5. The correct answer is b.  The recently-launched Green Button initiative models the successful Blue Button initiative that makes it very easy for consumers to “have timely access to their own electricity data in consumer-friendly and computer-friendly formats.”   You own your electricity data, and you can choose who may have access to it (aside from the utility that has legitimate needs for “revenue-grade” data to accurately bill your electricity use.)  However, and this is a big caveat, as consumers we need to know how the companies with whom we share the data will use it  and protect it from unauthorized access or use.  Just as we have expectations that retailers secure our credit card information, we should have similar expectations of any companies that we allow to access our electricity data.

The Smart Grid Dictionary defines energy efficiency as technologies, applications, and services that reduce the consumption of energy without impacting operations or behaviors.  It is that lack of change to behaviors or operations that sets energy efficiency (EE) apart from energy conservation.  EE produces negawatts – and treating it as that “penny earned” has been promoting welcome innovations in technologies and policies that financial and environmental benefits for consumers.

First, improved EE in products means lower total costs of ownership or TCOs for residential and business consumers.  The California Energy Commission recently adopted EE standards for battery chargers, which are vampire loads in just about every home and business.  Those chargers are often plugged in and drawing power even when they are not fulfilling their purpose of charging up a smart phone, mini-vac, or powered toothbrush.  In California alone, a cringe-worthy 5.3 gigawatthours of electricity is spent on chargers, mostly in the form of waste heat.  The standards, which take effect between 2013 – 2017, will require that manufacturers produce chargers that stop drawing power once the device battery is topped off.  That will lower consumers’ electricity bills and reduce the need to invest in additional generation capacity to support these vampire loads.  And that in turn helps keep electricity rates from rising.  California EE standards are reckoned to have saved its state residents over $36 billion since 1977.  That’s a lot of pennies earned.

Second, purposefully designing EE into products will reduce the amount of energy expended for any device’s operations – whether they are always tethered to the grid or reliant on battery power.  Researchers at the University of Michigan have a new technology called Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening that has reduced energy use in mobile devices by 44% in proof of concept testing.  By putting mobile devices into a “subconscious mode’, the device’s normal idle listening state consumes less energy, extending battery charges and reducing electricity consumption.   Another interesting technology trend first articulated by Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University and known as Koomey’s Law states that the amount of computing power per joule doubles every 1.6 years.  (A joule is a measure of energy, whereas a watt is a measure of the rate of energy consumption.)  Essentially, a fixed amount of computing power gets twice as energy efficient just under every two years, which has tremendous implications for our proliferation of electricity-guzzling data centers that support our growing use of cloud-based applications and digital storage.  IEEE’s local Silicon Valley Chapter of the Solid State Circuits Society is sponsoring a course about the fundamentals of low-power design, which portends opportunities for designers of computing devices, who have long understood the need to build in as much EE design as possible, to share their expertise with developers of consumer electronics.  These developments will ultimately reduce the costs of operation for many popular devices.

Third, thinking about energy efficiency as a penny earned enables policy-makers to support decoupling for electric utilities.  The Smart Grid Dictionary defines decoupling as a regulatory and market strategy that allows utilities to invest in and profit from efficiency-based capacity by assuring them a return that is equivalent to sales of electricity.  It means that utilities are not penalized for encouraging their customers to use less electricity.  Today, 30 states do not have pending or established decoupling policies in place for electricity and/or gas, and they should.  Consumers would like utilities to help them reduce their energy bills, but without decoupling, why would utilities negatively impact their revenues?  Understanding the full value of decoupling translates into political will to modify utility business models.  Why do regulators and legislators in these 30 states ignore the opportunities to save money for their citizens?     

Whether we’re looking at improving product designs or market mechanisms to encourage energy efficiency as that “penny earned”, the financial and environmental benefits for consumers are compelling.  Ben Franklin would approve.   

Modernizing the grid into a Smart Grid means that we’ll have bidirectional flows of electricity AND information.  (For a complete definition of the Smart Grid, see the Smart Grid Dictionary.)  Some of that information includes data communicated by smart meters about electricity consumption in homes and businesses.  Much of this behavioral data is new because it is readily available in a granular form.  Electric meters that can’t communicate this information still collect it, but it is typically read on a monthly basis as a difference in kilowatthours (kWh) from the past month’s reading to the present reading.  Other data is new because advances in wireless sensor technologies can give a cost-effective “voice” to previously uncommunicative devices like refrigerators, hot water heaters, and heating and air conditioning equipment.  We may also see new data made available from upgraded meters for gas and water too.

How this data is used has very interesting implications for consumers. Imagine a dishwasher manufacturer sending a text or email reminder to you to clean filters – all based on data from sensors that indicated this task had been forgotten for a while.  Perhaps kWh data collected by a utility is analyzed by a third party to determine energy efficiency program recommendations for your home or business.  These could be helpful services that save us money and time, but we need to have clearly given permission for data to be used in these ways.  We also need to understand the “chain of custody” – including who has access to that data, why they have access to that data, and how they protect that data.  And the biggest challenge of all is to develop awareness about the value that electricity consumption data – behavioral data about us – can have to us and other entities.

In 2007 the USA enacted the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA 2007), and it has an outsized role in fashioning key Smart Grid policies, including energy data privacy.  As part of the act, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was mandated to develop recommendations for cyber security standards.  NIST formed the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, (SGIP), which in turn begat the Cyber-Security Working Group (CSWG) to focus on the recommendations for cyber security standards.  An important subset of these cyber security recommendations covers data privacy, and I led a team of dedicated volunteers drawn from the CSWG privacy subgroup that recently completed a draft of recommendations for utilities and regulators.   The recommendations are based on examination of a select number of use cases that cover the electricity supply chain – generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption.  Our draft recommendations were mapped to ten generally accepted privacy principles published by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that are in use across a number of business sectors.  The principles are available in this downloadable document.  The entire CSWG privacy group will review the draft recommendations and their feedback will be incorporated into a final set of recommendations that will be publically available. 

These recommendations were written with utilities in mind, but the content will be useful to many businesses in the Smart Grid sector that offer hardware, software and services that have any contact with personal or behavioral data.  The recommendations will help educate utilities, regulators, and vendors to build safeguards that protect data privacy into products, services, policies, and procedures.   The information will also be helpful to encourage discussion about data privacy guidelines for the Internet of Things.  And ultimately, these ongoing activities and recommendations help protect consumers dealing with an increasingly data-rich world. 

My mother lives in a retirement community in Pennsylvania, and I was there for the holidays.  She handed me a stack of promotional mailings from electricity suppliers and said, “You’re the Smart Grid expert – you sort this out.”  I began by reading the letter from her current electricity supplier which listed two phone numbers and two websites for more information. I visited the website sponsored by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PPUC).  It is well-designed.  It is easy to find suppliers by zipcode, listed in alphabetical order with costs, fixed or variable pricing identification, termination fees, and links to each supplier’s site.  It took only 15 minutes of website reading and one call to a prospective supplier to answer a termination fee question, and my mother was enrolled with a new supplier.   She’s looking forward to the reduced kilowatt hour (kWh) rate now in effect during the coldest months of the year in her electrically-heated home.  Admittedly, this is a teaser rate that could increase in a few months time, so we’ll be watching for announcements of price increases and then revisit our supplier decision.

How is deregulation working for Pennsylvania?  At the end of one year, almost 25% of residential customers in Pennsylvania switched suppliers.  The churn rate is not evenly distributed among the seven regulated electric distribution companies, which ranges from a low of 7.7% to a whopping 70%.  Contrast that to the first year of Texas electricity market deregulation, which had only 14% of residential customers transitioning.  Almost 10 years into their electricity market deregulation activities, Texas now claims that 55% of its residential load has switched suppliers. 

The Pennsylvania results show there is some consumer awareness about shopping for electricity, but here are a couple of suggestions that the PPUC should consider.  While the supplier comparison website was nicely designed and easy to navigate, it only works if you have some means to access the internet.  My mother doesn’t surf the web, and she’s not alone in a state with a large population of senior citizens.  Of course, there’s the option of a phone number to call, but it can’t be easy to comparison shop some of the details of electricity pricing without a convenient display of information on a screen.  There’s also a 50 page booklet from the Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate (OCA) that contains much of the website information, but I doubt that it’s a popular option for many consumers. 

And beware if you use an Internet search term like “Pennsylvania electricity deregulation” instead of visiting the official PPUC- or OCA-sponsored sites.  Top page results come up for a number of third party suppliers that offer electricity at higher rates than those found on the PPUC site.  It is too easy for unsophisticated electricity consumers (the majority of any state’s population) to get incomplete information or limited supplier choices that may cost them more money than if they stayed with their current supplier. 

That doesn’t bode well for building positive experiences with deregulation, which could in turn impact the state’s ambitious Smart Grid goals.  It highlights one of the ongoing problems confronting utility and regulatory agency outreach efforts to residential populations.  More has to be done to provide convenient access to information for population segments that are not prepared to obtain their information via websites.  These segments often correlate to the consumer segments that perceive themselves to be at risk for increased bills – whether the activity is deregulation or a Smart Grid initiative.  If the PPUC is truly concerned about protecting its citizens, they should consider more F2F (face to face) outreach to educate them about their best sources of information for comparison shopping and find more ways to deliver that information to the “at-risk” populations.  The PPUC and the Office of Consumer Advocate should track and promote positive results in the form of use cases that illustrate how ordinary people are benefitting from these programs.    Making it easy and making it personal are two of the most important takeaways for deregulation education, and equally apply to Smart Grid initiatives as well.

The ebook, “The Smart Grid Consumer Focus Strategy:  Transforming Utility Operations to Build Consumer Value” co-authored by the blogger contains these suggestions and more insights to help utilities create successful outreach campaigns for Smart Grid initiatives.  The ebook is available at this website.

1.  Support a national energy policy that encourages development of clean and domestically-produced renewable sources of energy.  The Smart Grid integrates renewable sources of energy and builds the foundation for wide adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).  The faster we upgrade and update our electrical infrastructure and revise our policies to support distributed generation from renewables and EVs, the sooner we end our reliance on oil.  And that means the sooner we can keep that $1 Billion daily transfer of wealth from going offshore into the bank accounts of petro nations like Iran that don’t like us. 
2. Revise the tax code to eliminate the permanent subsidies, royalty forgiveness, and other tax breaks that fossil energy companies enjoy.  If subsidies are bad for young solar and wind power developers, then they are insanely stupid for established oil companies that earn record-breaking profits.  We can’t afford corporate welfare to multinationals that pollute our atmosphere with CO2 emissions and foul our waterways with spills and pipeline leaks.  The Smart Grid helps make that transition from dirty energy sources to clean ones that are locally produced.
3. Invest in promising new Smart Grid technologies and businesses.  To make that happen, we need long-lasting tax and investment policies that create market certainty for private investors, not the piecemeal policy erraticism that seems so uniquely applied to anything that reduces our reliance on dirty fossil fuels.   There are opportunities for the USA to take technology leadership positions in energy storage, energy efficient materials, components, and technologies, advanced analytics, and cybersecurity applications.  All of these are vital to the establishment and ongoing operations of the Smart Grid.  While we’re generating lots of heat about Solyndra, there’s been little light shed on the fact that even very smart venture capitalists generally see a 10% success rate on their investments. Thomas Edison, an inventive genius, had more failures than successes too.
4. Stop doing stupid things like making the world safe for incandescent light bulbs.  Do we pay our elected officials exorbitant salaries with perks so they can cost us more money in our annual energy bills?  The incandescent bulb, so beloved of a vocal minority in Congress, hasn’t changed much since Edison invented it.  It is an extremely inefficient source of light, and an inconvenient source of heat (which is simply wasted energy).  The Smart Grid not only seeks to increase energy supplies from renewables, it aims to decrease demand for electricity through use of more efficient lighting.  The 100W bulb that has captured the adoration of some Congressional Republicans costs $25/year for 6 hours of operation a day.  It is a total operating cost that is higher than that of compact fluorescents or other new lighting technologies. Consumers have benefited from Energy Star appliances in the form of lowered electricity bills, and we deserve to enjoy the monetary benefits that elimination of wasteful incandescent bulbs will bring to our wallets too. 
5. Allocate more funding to microgrid R&D in the Departments of Defense (DOD) and Energy (DOE).  The US military is the largest consumer of petroleum fuels in the world, and has grim statistics on the human costs incurred in fuel transport.  In 2007 alone, 170 US soldiers or civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving fuel.  That’s an avoidable cost when locally-produced electricity can reduce fuel needs.  In fact, the DOD’s first issued Operational Energy Strategy defines its marching orders much as many US electric utilities document them:  reduce demand, find alternative sources of energy, and improve security.  Encourage microgrid research and give it more funding.  The knowledge the military builds will be disseminated into civilian microgrid applications that are part of the Smart Grid, and could end up lifting much of the world out of energy poverty.

The Smart Grid Dictionary defines the Smart Grid as:  A bi-directional electric and communication network that improves the reliability, security, and efficiency of the electric system for small- to large-scale generation, transmission, distribution, and storage.  It includes software and hardware applications for dynamic, integrated, and interoperable optimization of electric system operations, maintenance, and planning; distributed energy resources interconnection and integration; and feedback and controls at the consumer level.  Emphasis is deliberately placed on software applications to highlight the tremendous potential that management and analytics software holds in this synergistic technology triad.   For instance, realtime monitoring of solar arrays – whether in distributed, small kilowatt rooftop installations or utility-scale (large megawatt) deployments can produce vast amounts of data about voltage and currents.  Software applications can use this data to optimize management of these assets in the field.  Transmission or distribution network operations managers could also see the exact amounts of power flowing from these renewable sources of energy, and react to fluctuations caused by weather, component failures, and planned maintenance.   These reactions could include realtime, software-based control of energy storage assets that could inject the required amounts of power to eliminate fluctuations in bulk power or distribution grids.  The energy storage assets can supplement power for limited or extended time frames, involving flywheels, pumped hydro, or zinc air batteries, just to name a few of the technology options coming into the market.

However, the reliance that the Smart Grid places on clean and distributed renewables requires some fundamental changes in our thinking about grid operations.  Grid management can become more decentralized with distributed software intelligence and business rules based on analytics automating decisions to modulate transmission and distribution grids with much more granularity than currently practiced with today’s technologies and techniques.  Automated decision-making through established operational business rules and realtime analytics would help ensure the reliability of transmission and distribution grids.  This means that as coal-burning generation plants are retired, these reliable but dirty sources of power can be replaced with clean renewables coupled with energy storage that can guarantee similar expectations of consistent power.  

Beyond these ongoing grid management activities in operations centers, data can be analyzed to determine component performance in renewable sites.  Analytics reports can identify if certain inverters or feeders are out of compliance with negotiated Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics so that asset owners could take corrective actions with contractors.  Analytics will also play key roles in simulations and modeling of various scenarios.  What if a wind generation facility experiences an unusual amount of wind gusts?  What impacts could a wildfire trigger in power generation output from nearby solar facilities – how much energy storage should be configured to ensure reliable power flows?  These scenarios can be simulated and operational responses can be documented and automated with relevant business rules and processes. 

There are many other intriguing possibilities for software applications in the Smart Grid, and these will help the electrical system evolve into a much more distributed and dynamic collection of networks and assets.  It’s time for software developers to consider how they can leverage the synergies of renewables generation, energy storage, and software and accelerate Smart Grid deployments.

Similarly, renewables-based generation, energy storage, and grid analytics/software are the three sisters of the Smart Grid – leveraging the synergies of their technologies to achieve greater reliable electricity yield than each technology could independently produce.   These three technologies can deliver their combined benefits for utility-scale generation as well as distributed generation and microgrids.  

Renewables, the first sister, are categorized as intermittent or steady-state sources of electrical energy.  Wind and solar are intermittent.  Geothermal and hydro (in most cases) are steady-state.  While steady-state is easier to manage, it’s not as well-distributed or readily accessible for most countries.  Solar and wind have distinct advantages in the fact that the sun shines everywhere and the wind is usually not too picky about where it blows.  Solar has great flexibility in where it can be placed –rooftops everywhere can be potential sites for distributed generation.  But intermittency is a vexing problem for planners and grid managers because it is vital to grid health to minimize fluctuations of energy.  Clouds passing over solar panels or temporary drops in wind create those fluctuations.  This is where the second sister comes into play. 

Innovations in battery technologies are transforming energy storage into cost-competitive solutions that partner well with intermittent renewables like wind and solar to deliver steady state power.   There are new technologies that overcome concerns of energy density, flammability, toxicity, and achieve grid-parity pricing.  Energy storage is the second sister of the Smart Grid.  Stationary and mobile (EV) forms of energy storage can play significant roles in utility scale and distributed generation utilizing solar and wind, because it can be deployed to smooth out temporal or weather-based fluctuations.  Renewables and energy storage deliver a potent synergy, but a third sister is needed to help manage these assets as they are integrated into transmission or distribution grids.

Grid analytics and grid management software are needed to manage increasing numbers of renewable generation and energy storage assets.  Utilities are building out IP-enabled networks to accommodate bi-directional communications, and this activity opens up opportunities for remote realtime monitoring and management of these new assets anywhere in the grid.   Realtime management of dispersed assets needs software to organize grid management activities.   It also requires analytics to provide proactive intelligence about conditions and predictive performance of grid networks and devices.  Grid analytics and management software enhance the reliability of electricity on the grid – a valuable synergy with renewables and energy storage. 

These technologies will accelerate the delivery of the benefits of the Smart Grid, but today exist as separate solutions.  Could a three sisters solution for the Smart Grid be the next brilliantly synergistic American innovation?  Like the Native Americans of the past, system integrators who specialize in distributed generation and microgrids can play a key role in creatively combining these technologies into solutions that fully leverage their synergies.  These solutions could also be exported globally to address developed and developing world energy needs.

There’s no single answer to the climate change mess we’re in, but Smart Grid advances will be primary contributors to the most effective reductions in CO2 emissions.  Here are two incremental efforts that can reduce our use of fossil fuels and improve the odds of avoiding the severest impacts of climate change.

Energy efficiency.  Residential and commercial buildings account for 40% of energy consumed in the USA, according to the Department of Energy.  Fossil fuels account for 77% of that energy expended to heat, cool, illuminate and operate those buildings.  Innovative retrofit solutions for building envelopes (windows, walls, and ceilings) can reduce energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills.   But energy efficiency innovations also extend into product designs and operations.  For instance, the USA wisely instituted energy efficiency standards for refrigerators back in 1978, and since then, even as these appliances have increased in size and features, their electricity consumption has decreased by more than two thirds.  The most recent round of refrigerator standards instituted in August of this year will trim another 25% of energy use by 2014.  Similar expectations should be applied to every appliance and electronics component that reside in our homes and office buildings.

Electric vehicles (EVs).   This is truly disruptive in terms of technology, policies, services and even business models, and it couldn’t happen at a more opportune time.  Electrification of personal transportation delivers beneficial impacts that range from environmental to economic to national security.  There’s a good report from the Electrification Coalition that details the numerous benefits that we can enjoy through transitioning to EVs.   This report recommends replacing traditional vehicle fleets to EVs as the first incremental step in that transition.  EVs reduce petroleum products consumption, which accounts for 94% of our transportation needs today.   A transition to EVs would eliminate a $1 billion per day transfer of wealth from the USA to countries that don’t like us.   

While these disruptions are most welcome to securing our energy security and refocusing investment within our borders, the Smart Grid offers strategic new uses of EVs beyond mere transportation.  The most disruptive impact of all is that the energy stored in EVs can potentially be harnessed to modify electricity consumption patterns.  EVs that are plugged into the grid during times of peak electricity use could be tapped to intelligently discharge just enough energy for utilities to ride-out those timeframes without building additional generation facilities or purchasing power at its most expensive price.   Transitioning to EV-based transport will require upgrades to our electric infrastructure, which are needed anyway to support integration of renewables and distributed small to large scale generation.  It will also require new software applications to manage EVs as mobile, temporary, and distributed energy sources.    There are enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs to create innovations in technologies and services to manage what is commonly known as the V2G (vehicle to grid) connection.  Even utilities and their regulatory agencies, typically cautious adopters of innovation, may develop EV business models that continue the focus on delivery of safe, reliable, and cost-effective electricity.  

The UN conference in Durban may not produce the game-changing agreements that we’d like to see, but in the USA we can challenge ourselves to be the leaders in the most dramatic reductions in carbon emissions through innovations in Smart Grid technologies, policies, and services.   

10/30:  Clean-up Begins After Historic nor’easter Leaves Nearly 770,000 CL&P Customers Without Power

11/4:  CL&P Approaching 300,000 Without Power

11/6:  CL&P Pushing to Restore 99 Percent of Customers Statewide by Midnight Tonight

11/9:  CL&P Completing Restoration Efforts

It took 10 days to fully restore power to Connecticut residents and businesses.   The fallout is still ongoing, with the latest casualty being the CL&P president, who resigned on November 17.  The governor of the state and six members of the Congressional delegation have asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to investigate this outage recovery effort.   But that’s the wrong question to ask.  The right question is – how do we make the grid more reliable and resilient?

To be clear, this was a catastrophic event that left almost 65% of CL&P’s customers shivering in the dark.  The financial damages are still being tallied.   And regional outages can occur within any utility’s footprint, because our current electrical grid has serious vulnerabilities caused by a reliance on centralized generation and an absence of energy storage.  This combination leaves customers at the mercy of every breaking tree limb, every car skidding into a utility pole, and every cyber attack targeted at generation and transmission assets. 

The Smart Grid offers a different and better scenario for recovery from grid failures.  No, the Smart Grid won’t prevent catastrophic events, but it can minimize the number of impacted customers through distributed generation using domestic renewables; distributed energy storage; and microgrids.  If CL&P had energy stored at key substations, they could have rationed electricity to select hours to give connected downstream customers at least a “lifeline” of power to run essential appliances and build a little heat in homes. 

Beyond redefining the electricity supply chain to incorporate generation and storage at the distribution level, the Smart Grid vision offers more possibilities for utilities and their regulatory agencies that are willing to apply innovative technologies and services to redefine their missions of offering safe, reliable, and affordable electricity.  Options include:

• Remote sensing and shut off of downed power lines – a certain improvement to public safety.  
• Portable renewable generation to provide lifeline electricity services to customers during outages – a concept being developed to eliminate energy poverty in developing nations.
• Smart meters – automatically alert utilities about power outages at the moment of failure, not at the moment of customer discovery. 
• Smart Grid-related technologies and programs that reduce electricity consumption on a permanent basis – also known as energy efficiency.
• Smart Grid-related technologies and programs that reduce electricity use for time-specific periods – otherwise identified as Demand Response programs.  

If I lived in Connecticut, I’d be asking CP&L and its regulators about their plans to improve grid reliability and resiliency using Smart Grid technologies.  But no matter where you live, these are good questions to ask your electric utility, and good expectations to place on your regulatory agencies.