Transmission & Distribution Technology
Intelligent design
Louise Smyth speaks with a US expert to discover how best to harness the great potential of smart grids.
Louise Smyth debate con un experto estadounidense cómo encontrar la mejor manera de aprovechar el gran potencial que tienen las redes inteligentes.
Louise Smyth spricht mit einem Experten aus den USA über die optimale Nutzung intelligenter Stromnetze.
W
hen it comes to smart grids, it’s fair to say that the USA has embraced the concept more enthusiastically
than the various other regions now starting to design and implement such schemes. Te success stateside can in part be attributed to the fortuitous coincidence between an ageing energy infrastructure that started creaking and groaning around the same time as digital technology emerged to offer an ‘anti-ageing’ solution. But the rise of the smart grid wasn’t
merely a result of a happy coincidence, as Steve Ehrlich, SVP product management at Space-Time Insight, explains. “Te smart grid was initially embraced about 10 years ago, driven mainly by labour cost savings associated with meter reading, customer services, field crew trips and remote service disconnect/reconnect. More recently, other business cases have emerged for a smarter grid. One is withstanding and recovering from our harsh weather. Another is integrating distributed and renewable energy sources, mainly residential solar power and large- scale wind farms.”
Te above factors have combined to translate the business case into an impressive rollout of technology. Ehrlich states: “Te Energy Information Agency of the US government lists 38.5 million residential smart meters in the USA in 2012, across 117.5 million households. Obviously, a smart grid includes much more than smart meters, but that’s a good benchmark of adoption.” Ehrlich believes that this progress is set
to snowball in the near future. “Tere’s a general sense that technology can make power delivery more efficient and give customers more control and options,” he explains. “But to fund smart grid projects, utilities need to show specific business cases that justify the investment. Knowledge of those business cases is just now solidifying. Early smart grid adopters are starting to publish the results of their first business cases and also finding additional, profitable business cases.” In some ways, establishing the business case for a smart grid is the easy part; getting such a scheme up and running to the best of its ability is a little trickier. Ehrlich’s firm offers visualisation solutions to manage and analyse the data created
Fig. 1. Smart meter intelligence.
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