Search Results for: demand response

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Britain readies for nation-wide Smart Meter rollout

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Smart Meter

An article in the UK’s Sunday Times recently talked about the plans for a nationwide rollout of Smart Meters in Britain.

From the article:

Telecoms giants Vodafone, O2 and BT and system integrators Logica, Accenture, IBM and Capgemini are understood to have started talks to form bidding consortiums…

The government has put smart meters at the heart of its energy policy but progress on its implemen-tation has been slow. A consensus has emerged recently between the Department for Energy and Climate Change, Ofgem, the regulator, and the big six utility companies over how it will be done.

Each utility will be responsible for fitting new meters for its customers, starting a roll-out from 2010…

To ensure transparency, a “central communications” group would be set up to electronically collect, process and distribute data and serve as the go-between for energy companies and the meters in their customers’ homes…

Ofgem is expected to run the tender for the contract, which would operate from 2010 to 2020. The winning group would likely consist of a telecoms provider and a systems integrator. There is an outside chance that the contract could be broken down regionally.

This is great news for Britain as it will allow for demand response projects to be rolled out with the consequent nationwide energy savings and the possibilities to increase the penetration of renewables on the grid. Ireland continues to drag its feet in this area with a limited pilot to begin next year. With the irish government hoping to reach 40% penetration of renewables by 2020, they really need to pick up the pace if they want to come anywhere near achieving that target.

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REALLY Smart Meters!

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Smart meter

Photo Credit yewenyi

Smart electricity meter projects are being rolled out all over the globe at this stage (here’s a map of the Smart Meter projects in the US), and with the Smart Meters, come Smart Grids and Demand Response programs whereby the utilities implement peak shaving programs (and in certain cases demand stimulation) to match demand and supply curves. This will lead to a more stable grid and therefore increase the amount of variable generators (i.e. weather based renewables) it is possible to add to the grid. Great.

However, this is not nearly ambitious enough as far as I am concerned. First off, as I have said previously, cheaper electricity typically has a higher % of renewables in the generation mix. Therefore, if I am getting a smart meter, I want it to be a very smart meter. I want my meter to be going out across the grid, checking the realtime price from all utilities and dynamically sourcing the energy from the cheapest supplier at any given time. Nothing too new there, I have written about that concept previously.

Taking that idea to the next level. Imagine if utilities were mandated to publish, not only the price of electricity in realtime, but also the generation mix. I could then have a Smart Meter which would actively chose the greenest electricity for me at any time. Or the one with the best price/renewables mix.

And if we had a SuperGrid in place, then that Green electricity might be coming from Danish windfarms, Icelandic geothermal generation or North African solar farms.

Now that would be a Really Smart Meter!

UPDATE – I have been asked the relevance of the photo above – it is subtle, anyone care to guess?

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GreenMonk news roundup 12/09/2008

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Oracle Utilities, Smart Grids and vehicle to grid

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I was talking to Guerry Waters, the VP Industry Strategy in the Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit the other day.

Guerry was telling me about Oracle Utilities’ background and how they came about as the result of Oracle’s acquisition of SPL back in Nov 2006 and Lodestar in 2007.

We got onto the subject of Demand Response (surprise, surprise!) and I raised my concerns about utilities being too command and control. When I said that for DR to really take off consumers need to be in control of their devices Guerry said:

The idea of automatic control of your Demand Response in the home is very intriguing but very much on the edge now, so what we are doing is we are working with a number of companies, like Tendril, that provides Home Area Networks (HANs) and control of devices in the home, where there can be parameters set from signals that are being passed to the HAN about price…. and bring that down to the HAN and let the HAN respond according to parameters that have been set by the consumer themselves…. and give the consumer opt-out capabilities from that.

Guerry went on to describe scenarios where your Home Area Network can contact you via SMS, for instance if you are away from home to alert you that your HAN is about to respond to a DR signal and do you want to overide or not!

Guerry did say that there are very few utilities thinking this far out but the fact that there are any is hugely heartening!

Our conversation went on to discussing vehicle to grid technologies and it was super to see that Oracle are thinking about the challenges to be overcome and ways to roll out the technologies required to make this a reality.

With both SAP and Oracle rolling out enabling technologies in this space, the Electricity 2.0 vision is quickly becoming a reality.

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Utilities are too top-down, command and control

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Top-Down

Photo Credit Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan

Utilities are top-down.

Whenever I talk to utilities about Smart Grids and Smart Meters they always trot out the same speech. They want to use Demand Response for peak shaving and they want to implement it by having a mechanism whereby they can come in to their customer’s houses at times of maximum demand and turn down the settings on the aircon, immersion heater, etc.

Unfortunately this kind of traditional top-down, command and control attitude is more likely to turn people off Demand Response programs than to sell it to them.

I know that as a consumer I want to be able to program my appliances myself so that I decide when they turn on/off in response to price signals from the grid. The same is true for fridges/freezers and water immersions – I want them to change thermostat settings to take in electricity at times when energy is cheap and not when it is expensive by MY definitions of cheap and expensive.

I want control of my appliances. I do not want the utility deciding to come in and adjust or turn them on/off for me because it suits them.

Demand Response programs will be hugely beneficial to the utilities and consumers alike but they are complex to explain. If you couple that with the utility having control of your appliances they suddenly become a far harder sell.

Give customers more control of their electricity bill. Allow them reduce costs without reducing usage, by owner controlled, programmatic, time-shifting of consumption and suddenly Demand Response programs becomes an easy sell.

And when you couple that with how Demand Response will stabilise the grid facilitating greater penetration of variable supplies (i.e. weather-based renewables like wind and solar) and you have a win, win, win!

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GreenMonk news roundup 11/21/2008

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  • Save Energy Star before it becomes a Black Hole

    The U.S. government’s Energy Star program is in trouble. Despite all the media references it garners, the program is failing the American public and, without serious intervention, will collapse in on itself to become a black hole of irrelevance and wasted resources.

    tags: energy star, epa, doe, energy efficiency

  • The Energy Roadmap – Moving Toward Zero Energy Homes

    The vision of ‘zero energy homes’ is to transform the residential built environment from a major consumer of energy, to a neutral, or net zero energy environment where the annual amount of energy produced and consumed is equal. More forward looking architects and energy system designers envision homes that are (annually) net producers of energy and able to push energy back into the grid, or fuel vehicles

    tags: zero energy home, energy, home

  • Nanotechnology Now – Press Release: “Today’s Broken Power Grid to be Replaced by a Smarter Power Web”

    The power grid today is wasteful, costly, inefficient and dumb – and ill-equipped to address many pressing energy issues, from the need to focus on climate change and carbon cost, to the demand for high reliability. However, the advent of distributed generation, distributed storage, and distributed intelligence will change power infrastructure into an intelligent and more nimble power web.

    “Smart grid technologies, like advanced metering infrastructure and demand response services, will enable the transformation of the current grid to a more reliable and intelligent power web,” said Ying Wu, Senior Analyst at Lux Research.

    Looks like he has been reading GreenMonk.net!!!

    tags: electricity 2.0, electranet, grid 2.0, smart grid, demand response

  • Coming Soon: Improved Lithium Ion Batteries?

    A team led by Jaephil Cho at Hanyang University in Korea has now developed a new material for anodes, which could clear a path for a new generation of rechargeable batteries. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, their new material involves three-dimensional, highly porous silicon structures.

    tags: batteries, lithium, lithium ion, rapid charge

  • EcoGeek – Clean Technology

    Solfocus, whose technology focuses 500x the normal strength of sunlight onto tiny bits of ultra-efficient (ultra-expensive) solar material has just released a new solar unit that it promises has “the highest energy density and energy yield of any photovoltaic system available today.”

    tags: solfocus, solar concentrating, photovoltaic, photovoltaic solar, solar power

  • Micro Fuel Cells Get Closer to Replacing Batteries

    In a recent study, a team of researchers has developed micro-sized direct methanol fuel cells (microDMFC) that achieve significantly improved fuel efficiency and maintain a good power density while operating at room temperature. The energy density (measured in watt-hours per liter) of the new fuel cells is 385 Wh/L, which is superior to lithium ions batteries’ value of 270 Wh/L.

    The research, led by Dr. Steve Arscott at the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN) in France, working in collaboration with SHARP Corporation in Nara, Japan, is published in a recent issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, and a second study has been accepted to the Journal of Power Sources.

    tags: methanol, batteries, fuel cell, methanol fuel cell, lithium ion

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Smart Grid demo at the SAP for Utilities Conference

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I attended the SAP for Utilities conference last week in San Antonio and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the Utilities attending were thinking about rolling out Smart Grids or were already running pilot Smart Grids. There were even a couple who were well underway with their Smart Grid rollout project.

Demand Response was being discussed extensively and was cited by most as one of the principal advantages of Smart Grids.

Smart Grids and Demand Response are topics we have covered extensively here on GreenMonk.net and they are core to the Electricity 2.0 talk I gave in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo. The importance of Smart Grids and Demand Response cannot be overstated when it comes to energy efficiencies and energy demand management.

SAP are working closely with utilities through the Lighthouse Council, to ensure that whenever a utility wants to go from a traditional grid to a smart grid infrastructure, SAP will have the necessary software pieces in place for them (Enterprise Asset Management, Customer Relationship Management, and the newer Energy Capital Management).

In the video above, Russell Boyer demonstrates a Smart Grid in action. In this use case, Russell acts as the utility call center for a customer who is moving out and wants their power disconnected. The Smart Grid allows the agent to take a meter reading, and shut off power to the meter remotely. This isn’t the best demonstration of the potential of Smart Grids but it was the first time I saw Smart Grid technologies live in action and I have to admit to being wow’d by it.

[Disclosure – SAP covered my expenses for attending this conference]

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Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

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Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2expoeu08 w2eb)

I spoke today at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin and the title of my talk was:
Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

The talk was about demand response, smart grids, renewables etc. and it received extremely positive feedback so I thought I’d share the slide deck here for anyone who may be interested.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/18/2008

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Is micro (home) generation of electricity good for the environment?

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Home solar
Photo Credit benefit of hindsight

Microgeneration, the generation of electricity by home owners, is becoming increasingly common, especially with the cost of energy going up and the cost of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels for the home falling.

The majority of people deploying these solutions are doing so to 1) lower their home energy bills and 2) to help the environment.

What if I told you that often installing microgeneration equipment does not help the environment?

Bear with me while I try to explain. This is complex, counter-intuitive and I am not the world’s best communicator!

Grid operators have problems integrating renewable energy sources onto the grid right now because they are a variable source of supply. Couple that with the variability of demand and your grid starts to become increasingly unstable.

By far the most economic renewable energy source currently is wind but wind energy’s supply curve is often almost completely out of phase with demand (wind blows stronger at night when there is least demand for energy).

The more renewables that are brought onto the grid, the greater an issue this becomes with grid operators having to shut down production from wind farms in times of oversupply! Bear in mind also that there has to be enough generation capacity from non-wind sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear, etc.) to pick up the slack on days when the wind doesn’t blow.

In times of oversupply from renewables, it would be far preferable to be ramping up consumption of energy using moveable loads, rather than shutting down production from renewables.

Now consider the home-owner who has deployed their own wind turbine. At times when the wind is blowing this home-owner is generating power thereby reducing their demand just when there is an oversupply on the grid! And if they have a net metering agreement with their utility, they further exacerbate the problem by pumping extra electricity into the grid, just when it isn’t required!

Conversely, on calm days, when extra energy is most needed, micro-generation contributes nothing.

There are two main problems:
1. There are no economic energy storage technologies currently available – though this situation is evolving rapidly with the ramping up of investment into battery research by the transportation industry in particular and
2. Real-time pricing data for electricity generation are not exposed to the consumer – if they were, and automated demand response mechanisms were put in place, you would see a radical shift in the energy consumption curve (people would consume energy when it was cheaper – i.e. when it is abundant).

If these two nuts were cracked i.e. economic energy storage mechanisms were available and real-time pricing data were exposed, micro-generators could generate energy when the wind blows, store it and then profitably sell it back to the grid when demand increases, or the wind drops.

For now though, while microgeneration may be beneficial in reducing your energy bills, it is of no benefit to the environment.

Note that I didn’t address CHP in this post because I was trying to keep things simple! CHP can be beneficial, as can any microgeneration, if the production of energy increases in line with the price of electricity.

As the price of electricity goes up, so too does its carbon footprint. If you consume electricity when it is cheap, you are facilitating the greater penetration of renewables onto the grid. If, as a micro-generator, you can produce clean power when electricity is expensive, then you are helping the environment.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I fundamentally believe microgeneration is a good thing. However, given the current antiquated state of the grid in many countries, the disconnect between generation and demand profiles for wind particularly, and the lack of decent energy storage technologies, the environmental benefits of microgeneration are far from straightforward. This will change as energy storage options improve and demand response mechanisms and smart grids are deployed.