Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Dr Hugo Niesling of Wattpic Energia.
Wattpic are based in Barcelona and while their main product is photovoltaic trackers, they do a lot of research into demand response technologies and have a microgrid near Girona which has been operating successfully off-grid for 15 years making extensive use of demand response and was the only place with power when recent snow storms left 250,000 people in the region without power!
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Daniel Cumming of Schneider Electric. Schneider are one of the world’s oldest and largest companies in the energy space having been founded in 1836 (yes 18!) and with revenues of ?15.79bn in 2009 [PDF].
We chatted about two of Schneider’s offerings in the Smart Grid space – their remote telecontrol product set and their power monitoring products.
While at the Smart Grids Europe conference last week, I had a talk with Pascal Julienne, President & EMEA Director of BPL Global.
BPL Global, who have been making smart grid software since 2005 produce a smart grid platform for utilities and have rolled out their solution to First Energy (one of the largest utilities in the US) .
Despite the background noise we had a great chat about Smart Grids, smart buildings and energy resource management.
We have pointed to the ongoing convergence of wireless communications and smart grids before, for example in this video about Tropos Networks and in Tom’s stump pitch on sustainability and mobility, but some news from this week throws the trend into stark relief.
Carbon Trust investments, the VC arm of a non-profit organisation working to lower the UK’s carbon emissions just announced it is to invest in a network management company called Arieso.
Why would Carbon Trust do that? After all, what does mobile network optimisation have to do with energy management? According to the newenergyworldnetwork story:
Rachael Nutter of CT Investment Partners said, ?Energy consumption in mobile phone base stations is a significant proportion of the opex of mobile operators, as high as 50 per cent in the most extreme cases.
That’s the thing about sustainability – it doesn’t need to be seen as a cost center… rather it can, and should be, part of optimisation activities. Lower carbon, lower energy, cheaper mobile roll-outs. What’s not to like?
If you’ve been following GreenMonk for a while you should know we’re wedded to bottom up sustainability approaches – “from the roots up” as we call it, which is one reason we’ve sponsored, and contributed to the awesome UK HomeCamp community, founded by Chris Dalby, who now works at UK smartmeter firm Current Cost. Seems things are moving along there too.
One of the key players attempting to drive home automation as an activity for “civilians” is ZigBee. It just started working with GreenPeak, which specialises in ultra low power mobile silicon chips, designed to be used in battery-free devices. [See a theme emerging? ;-)] No batteries isn’t just a lower carbon play though- it also means less heavy metals and toxic chemicals. What’s the news? GreenPeak is now Zigbee compliant.
Finally some smart grid news.
Swiss smart meter player just took $165m in new funding.
Could be smart timing.
The Climate Group, sponsored by GE, Google, HP, Intel, Nokia and others? just called on Barack Obama to adopt a goal of providing every household with real time information about their electricity use.
Meanwhile last week Microsoft hohm and Ford announced they are working together on home energy to Electric Vehicle management and integration, to help people that own these EVs charge them cost effectively. Its worth pointing to one of my favourite GreenMonk interviews in that light- we talk to Greg Frenette of Ford about EV smart grid convergence.
It really is time to run the first HomeCamp US!
Ironically enough, when I searched for a creativecommons attribution only shot of a smartmeter i found one from my colleague Michael Cot? in Austin. His utility called it a smartmeter, but unless he? has access to the data generated I don’t see how it deserves the name. But that’s a subject for a different blog, and indeed a line of Greenmonk research.
The really keen eyed among you may have noticed how many of the links above come from newnet news. No accident. I love the feed. Its like a shot of good news tequila every morning – something to warm your spirits.
I talked to several of the exhibitors at the Smart Grids Europe 2010 conference in Amsterdam last week.
Amongst them was Mary Ann Tillman of Convergys. Convergys are a large US company with 75,000 employees in over 70 countries and revenues in 2009 over $3bn.
Convergys business was traditionally customer information (billing) software for mobile phone companies. Convergys realised that with the rollout of Smart Meters, utilities will need to change billing software to one capable of taking in vast quantities of customer data in real-time. Kinda like mobile phone companies have been doing for quite a while now…
Last year convergys rolled out their first smart grid CIS solution for an investor backed utility in the US.
Photo credit mckaysavage
Despite a lot of talk and some high profile trials the day we have ubiquitous full Smart Grids is still a long way off.
I attended the Smart Grids Europe conference in Amsterdam this week.
It was a great conference, I met a ton of interesting people and had some fascinating conversations.
I can’t help feeling a little deflated though.
I’m a huge advocate of Smart Grids. I gave my first international talk about Smart Grids and demand side management (Demand Response) at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen back in early 2007. We are now a full three years later and many utility companies have yet to roll out smart meter pilot programs.
Others are rolling out smart meters more because of pending of legislative requirements than because of any desire help reduce people’s energy footprints.
In fact, after talking to more utility companies, I suspect that smart grids may not proceed beyond smart meter deployments in some regions. The recent Oracle survey of Utility CxO’s confirms this view
utilities executives put improving service reliability (45 percent) and implementing smart metering (41 percent) at the top of the list [of Smart Grid priorities]
So why the apparent passive aggressive response from the utility companies?
Well, they have to keep the lights on. To paraphrase the old saw, they do not want to ‘fix’ their grid, if it ain’t broke! And, let’s be fair, the idea of investing large sums of money to help their customers use less of their product isn’t one which sits comfortably with them. That’s understandable.
And no utility wants to have the kind of customer blowback that PG&E saw with their botched smart meter rollout in Bakersfield.
But there is a huge global imperative for Smart Grids – the Smart 2020 report said:
Smart grid technologies were the largest opportunity found in the study and could globally reduce 2.03 GtCO2e , worth ?79 billion ($124.6 billion).
How then do we square that circle?
We could legislate for them but a better approach would be to change the landscape in which the utility companies operate such that there is a business case for full smart grid deployments.
I suspect the best approach would be the introduction of a carbon tax. This is something we need to do anyway (and the mechanisms for doing so are a topic for a separate post) but if there were a tax on CO2 production, it would be in utility companies (and their customers) interests to cut back on energy consumption.
Even if there were a strong business case for smart grids, given the glacial speeds at which utility companies move, I suspect it is going to be many years before we see full smart grid implementations.
I decided to run a series of interviews with people deeply involved in the Smart Grid space. I’m calling it the Smart Grid Heavy Hitters series. I will publish a new interview every Thursday until I run out of interviewees (or out of energy – poor pun intended, sorry!).
In this, the first of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to Oracle’s VP of Industry Strategy, Guerry Waters.
It was a great interview – in it we talked about:
I’d like to thanks Guerry and Oracle for being such willing participants in this project and Ludovic Leforestier for helping make this interview happen!.
What we have got here is a failure to communicate
The famous line from legendary movie Cool Hand Luke is the first thing that comes to mind when one hears about the fiasco which PG&E’s smart meter rollout in Bakersfield Ca. has become.
From the report on the SmartMeters.com site:
a class-action lawsuit has been filed representing thousands that will demand damages from the utility and third-parties also involved in the $2.2 billion project.
Bakersfield residents believe their new smart meters are malfunctioning because their bills are much higher than before. PG&E claims higher bills are due to rate hikes, an unusually warm summer, and customers not shifting demand to off-peak times when rates are lower.
This has to be a huge embarrassment for PG&E and their partners who are spending $2.2 billion on this project.
So what has gone wrong?
A recent report in the New York Times raises speculation that the meters themselves are to blame:
Elizabeth Keogh, a retired social worker in Bakersfield, Calif., who describes herself as “a bit chintzy,†has created a spreadsheet with 26 years of electric bills for her modest house. She decided that her new meter was running too fast.
Ms. Keogh reported to the utility that the meter recorded 646 kilowatt-hours in July, for which she paid $66.50; last year it was 474 kilowatt-hours, or $43.37.
At a hearing in October organized by her state senator, Ms. Keogh took out two rolls of toilet paper — one new, one half used up — and rolled them down the aisle, showing how one turned faster than the other. “Something is wrong here,†she said.
Scores of electric customers with similar complaints have turned out at similar hearings. At one in Fresno, Calif., Leo Margosian, a retired investigator, testified that the new meter logged the consumption of his two-bedroom townhouse at 791 kilowatt-hours in July, up from 236 a year earlier. And he had recently insulated his attic and installed new windows, Mr. Margosian said.
I spoke to good friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Jeff Nolan earlier today after I saw him Tweet:
yeah I’m actually pretty pissed, PG&E installed a so called “smart meter” and my utility bill increased $300.
It seems Jeff was having the same problem and his bill was also up significantly over the same month last year.
There are a number of problems here – all to do with transparency and communication.
If, as PG&E say, this is because of “customers not shifting demand to off-peak times when rates are lower”, then it follows that PG&E have either failed to communicate the value of shifting demand or the time when rates are lower.
One of the advantages of a smart grid is that the two way flow of information will allow utilities to alert customers to real-time electricity pricing via an in-home display. PG&E have not rolled out in-home displays with their smart meters, presumably for cost reasons. If they lose the class-action law suit, that may turn out to have been an unwise decision.
Even worse though, in a further post on Twitter, Jeff said:
I’m waited for PG&E to put up the daily usage numbers, I won’t get those until next month for some unexplained reason
This defies belief, frankly.
It seems that PG&E’s smart grid rollout is woefully under-resourced at the back-end. What PG&E should have is a system where customers can see their electrical consumption in real-time (on their phone, on their computer, on their in-home display, etc.) but also, in the same way that credit card companies contact me if purchasing goes out of my normal pattern, PG&E should have a system in place to contact customers whose bills are going seriously out of kilter. Preferably a system which alerts people in realtime if they are consuming too much electricity when the price is high, through their in-home display, via sms,Twitter DM, whatever.
Jeff himself likened this situation to the e-voting debacle where the lack of transparency around the e-voting machines meant the whole process collapsed. In the same way, a lack of open standards around smart meters means we can only trust the smart meter manufacturers and utilities when they tell us that they are operating honestly. That is unlikely to fly.
This debacle has massive implications, not just for PG&E’s $2.2 billion smart meter rollout, but for smart meter projects the world over.
Transparency and communications failures can lead to utilities being sued by their customers, as we have seen with the PG&E example. Not a desirable situation for any company. The PR fallout from the Bakersfield rollout means PG&E will have a much harder time convincing other customers to sign up for smart meters and may potentially set back smart grid projects in California for years.
You should follow me on twitter here.
Photo credit svale
Photo credit Ian Muttoo
Guido Bartels is General Manager of IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities Industry. Guido leads IBM’s corporate initiative around building an ‘Intelligent Utility Network,’ IBM’s portfolio of offerings and capabilities for the Smart Grid.
Guido is also a member of the Electricity Advisory Committee at Department of Energy, an organization whose mission is to
provide advice to the U.S. Department of Energy in implementing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, executing the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and modernizing the nation’s electricity delivery infrastructure
And Guido holds the position of Chairman at GridWise Alliance, the US Smart Grid industry association.
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/GuidoBartels.mp3]I invited Guido onto the show to discuss the current state of Smart Grid roll-outs globally and I asked him, amongst others, the following questions:
Define what is a smart grid (there are a lot of definitions out there!)
Why do we need them? What are the benefits of smart grid?
What is your vision of what the ideal Smart Grid rollout would be?
and what would be necessary to achieve it.
What differences are there in global geographies?
Are regulationss affecting rollout?
Can you point to any good smart grid rollouts?
Download the entire interview here
(12.7mb mp3)
Photo credit Barack Obama
President Barack Obama was in Florida on Tuesday this week for the official opening of Florida Power and Light’s new solar energy power plant. The 90,000+ solar panel plant, which has been installed across 180 acres of the 5,000 acre FPL property, is expected to generate 25MW of clean electricity (enough to power 3,000 homes) making it the largest operating solar power plant in the US.
President Obama took the opportunity to announce (slightly sooner than was expected) the awarding of $3.4 billion in investment grants to help spur the transition to smart grids in the US.
According to theReuters report:
The grants, which range from $400,000 to $200 million, will go to 100 companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and other partners in 49 states — every state except Alaska….
The winning companies have secured an additional $4.7 billion in private money to match their government grants, creating $8.1 billion in total investment in the smart grid.
Full listings of the grant awards by category and state are available here and here. A map of the awards is available here.
The announcement includes:
And some of the outcomes of the awards will be:
- Will put the US on pace to deploy more than 40 million smart meters in American homes and businesses over the next few years
- Install more than 1 million in-home displays, 170,000 smart thermostats, and 175,000 other load control devices to enable consumers to reduce their energy use. Funding will also help expand the market for smart washers, dryers, and dishwashers, so that American consumers can further control their energy use and lower their electricity bills.
- Install more than 200,000 smart transformers that will make it possible for power companies to replace units before they fail thus saving money and reducing power outages
- Install more than 850 sensors – called ‘Phasor Measurement Units’ – that will cover 100 percent of the U.S. electric grid and make it possible for grid operators to better monitor grid conditions and prevent minor disturbances in the electrical system from cascading into local or regional power outages or blackouts. This monitoring ability will also help the grid to incorporate large blocks of intermittent renewable energy, like wind and solar power, to take advantage of clean energy resources when they are available and make adjustments when they’re not.
- Install almost 700 automated substations, representing about 5 percent of the nation’s total that will make it possible for power companies to respond faster and more effectively to restore service when bad weather knocks down power lines or causes electricity disruptions.
- Reduce peak electricity demand by more than 1400 MW, which is the equivalent of several larger power plants and can save ratepayers more than $1.5 billion in capital costs and help lower utility bills. Since peak electricity is the most expensive energy – and requires the use of standby power generation plants – the economic and environmental savings for even a small reduction are significant. In fact, some of the power plants for meeting peak demand operate for only a few hundred hours a year, which means the power they generate can be 5-10 times more expensive than the average price per kilowatt hour paid by most consumers
- Put the US on a path to get 20% or more of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.
Those are some pretty impressive numbers and they should go a long way towards helping the US modernise its ageing electricity distribution system, facilitating the greater penetration of renewable power suppliers onto the grid and thereby reducing America’s enormous carbon footprint!