With the difficulty of traveling these days, I like to bring you insights from conferences around the United States. I have found the time between the conference and the flight home to be a good time to reflect on critical discussions from each conference. Last week, I journeyed across the fruited plains to Lincoln, Nebraska for Lincoln Electric System’s (LES) Smart Grid educational forum. It was hostile territory for me being a KU Jayhawk, but through the conference I learned, among various things about a smarter grid, that Kansas Jayhawks and Nebraska Cornhuskers can get along.
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LES designed the day-long event to introduce the city of Lincoln to the smart grid. LES expected about 100 participants, but about 200 participants registered for the conference. Participants ranged from city council members to solar energy advocates to meter readers.
The event was timely because LES just submitted its application for the U.S. Department of Energy's Smart Grid Investment Grant Program seeking funds up to $33.5 million. The utility is looking to deploy an end-to-end smart meter system—so, meters, communications networks, software and so on—across its entire service territory. The plan is to get this metering infrastructure in place and then look at how the company can build upon the project.
The morning presentations discussed the smart grid basics. We moved through presentations that defined the smart grid, the benefits of a smart grid and a national (and regional) perspective on smart grid activities.
Then two other public power companies—Austin Energy and Tacoma Power—spoke during lunch to discuss their efforts in this space. It was interesting to see the different experiences each utility had and it really made all of the stuff discussed in the morning more tangible for attendees. Austin Energy was moving onto what it described as Smart Grid 2.0, which focuses more on the end-user technologies, such as distributed generation, home area networks and electric vehicles. There was also an interesting slide that showed just how many systems that a smart grid impacts. According to the presenter, out of about 30 major systems at utility companies, about 20 of them would be impacted significantly by smart grid efforts. You can see the slide at http://www.les.com/pdf/smart_grid_carvallo_081309.pdf. Tacoma Power, on the other hand, has focused more on communications networks and is now looking at a broader deployment of smart meters. Tacoma is looking to do an AMI project for $64.5 million, with funding from the smart grid grant program. This meant reprioritizing some of their capital investments over the next 10 years to move the smart meter project ahead.
The afternoon presentations then focused on various smart grid components, from smart meters to electric vehicles—including a presentation about the Chevy Volt—to smart appliances.
Questions from the audience reflected a variety of concerns, from concerns about economic development aspects (i.e., losing jobs to technology), the Big Brother aspects of it all, and the costs and benefits of the technologies. From my presentation, I fielded a couple of questions about efforts going on in the transmission space and the potential of high voltage direct current transmission lines. It was definitely nice to see people thinking beyond just the endpoint technologies, but electric vehicles and solar panels were still very hot topics.
The idea of regional considerations for a smarter grid really seemed to resonate with the audience. At the end of the day, the LES CEO got up to summarize the day’s events. He discussed the importance of looking at regional nature of smart grid activities and how a smart grid means different things to different utilities and we need to have a lot of different groups beyond the utility involved to make these projects effective. Indeed.
Thanks for reading!
H.
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