Search Results for: "smart grid"

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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Tropos Networks CEO, Tom Ayers

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In this, the fifth of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to the CEO of Tropos Networks, Tom Ayers. Tropos develop wireless broadband networks for Smart Grid applications and offer complete network management, as well as enhanced security features. Tropos is the only wireless broadband network provider with FIPS 140-2 certification.

Tom and I had a great chat, we talked about:

  • Tom and Tropos’ definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
  • Why we need Smart Grids and the efficiency gains we will achieve from them
  • The security issues round wireless Smart Grids
  • Tropos IP, Smart Grid standards and open protocols
  • Best practice Smart Grid rollouts
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Smart Grid Heavy Hitters series – Landis+Gyr President and COO Andreas Umbach

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This is the fourth of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, and in it I talked to the President and COO of Landis+Gyr, Andreas Umbach. Landis+Gyr have been in the meter business for decades now so I was very interested to hear what Andreas had to say.

It was a great chat, we talked about:

  • Andreas’ and Landis+Gyr’s definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
  • The differences in smart grid rollouts around the world and
  • Demand response programs which are consumer friendly
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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Silver Springs Networks’ Raj Vaswani

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This is the third of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, and in it I talked to the CTO of Silver Springs Networks, Raj Vaswani.

It was a great interview – in it we talked about:

  • Raj’s definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
  • The fact that, to-date Smart Grids are quite notional
  • How long it will be before home energy portals, vehicle to grid, and similar technologies will emerge and
  • The differences between Europe and the US in terms of Smart Grid rollouts

I wanted to go on for longer but unfortunately we ran out of time!

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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – SAP’s Stefan Engelhardt

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In this, the second of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to SAP’s Head of Industry Business Unit for Utilities, Stefan Engelhardt.

It was a great interview – in it we talked about:

  • Stefan’s definition of a Smart Grid
  • The benefits of Smart Grids to both the utilities and the customers of the utilities
  • The state of Smart Grid rollouts to-date
  • What an ideal Smart Grid would look like
  • What barriers are holding up Smart Grid rollouts
  • Which regions are further along in Smart Grid rollouts and which are lagging behind
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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Oracle’s Guerry Waters

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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:

  • Oracle’s vision of a successful Smart Grid
  • The benefits of Smart Grids
  • The requirements for a successful Smart Grid rollout
  • The impacts of regulations on Smart Grid rollouts
  • Examples of Smart Grids and
  • Oracle’s place in the Smart Grid ecosystem

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!.

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Ford discusses their Electric Vehicle and smart grid integration plans

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Just before Christmas I had a chat with Ford’s head of battery electric vehicle applications, Greg Frenette. We discussed how Ford has been working with utilities and industry organisations to ready its electric vehicles for deep integration into smart grids.

It was fascinating for me to see just how far Ford have proceeded with their thinking on this.

Here’s the transcript of our conversation.

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone and welcome to GreenMonkTV. My guest in the show today is Greg Frenette. Greg is the Manager of Battery Electric Vehicle Applications for the Ford Motor Company. Greg let’s start of with a bit of historical background. Ford have been looking at electric vehicles for some time now; I think 2005 was when you started looking at electric vehicles and smart grid integration. Were you working on electric vehicles even before that?

Greg Frenette: Oh! Sure, we’ve been working on electric vehicles for over 20 years, in our research organization primarily. And when I say electric, I talk about not only battery electric, but fuel cell electric vehicles. But it was in 2007 when we decided to explore a demonstration fleet of plug-in vehicles, plug-in hybrids that we started thinking very seriously about the integration of those vehicles with the grid and in July 2007 announced a partnership with Southern California Edison, which has since grown to a partnership with about 12 different utilities and industry organizations.

Tom Raftery: What is the basis of that partnership, I mean Southern Cal Edison is a utility company, is it that you are test bedding your electric vehicles to see how they fit in with smart grids or what’s the basis of the partnership?

Greg Frenette: That’s exactly it. We’ve got some very high-fidelity Ford Escape production vehicles that have been modified with Lithium-Ion battery packs and charging systems and we’re really exploring what the interaction of that vehicle with the grid is like. We are trying to get a better understanding of the win-win solutions between industries that’ll be necessary in order to commercialize plug-in hybrids as well as full battery electric vehicles.

Tom Raftery: From the research, what are you guys seeing, how well do electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles — how well do they integrate with smart grids?

Greg Frenette: I think the opportunity is tremendous. With our plug-in Escape fleet of about 21 vehicles that we’ve deployed across North America we’re now in the process of setting up communications and actually demonstrating communications between the vehicles and smart meters which are becoming more and more available today in the market.

So we are finding that whole idea of how a vehicle interfaces with the grid is more than simply plugging it in; there’s an opportunity to communicate and an opportunity for the consumer – automotive consumer, electric consumer to make choices and to communicate those choices back and forth from the vehicle to the grid and vice versa.

I’ll give you an example; if you are sitting in one of our plug-in Escape prototypes, hybrid prototypes, today, what you’d find is if you decided you didn’t want to start charging until the rates are cheaper say around midnight or so you could tell the vehicle don’t charge until then, or if you wanted a full charge by a certain time in order to return home or whatever you could then dictate that, communicate it through the vehicle to a smart meter that would then modulate the charges such a way to meet your needs.

Tom Raftery: Interesting! So you are basically shifting your consumption to match times when electricity is less expensive.

Greg Frenette: You can do that; you can also, though, if you are plugged in and you don’t have a need for a particular charging and you have some freedom flexibility, you can indicate that you are willing to accept interruptible service in order to, again, reduce the cost of charging your vehicle. So that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the, sort of, communications that will become available in vehicles and the, kind of, capability we’ll have to really interact with the grid and dictate how we use energy with vehicles.

Tom Raftery: One of the other issues around integration of Battery Electric Vehicles and smart grids is the billing. So say if I go and visit somebody else, some cousins or some neighbours or some family or something and they live a couple of hours away and I need to charge to get home, can I plug in my vehicle in to their electric outlets and have it billed back to my account, is that — are you working on those kinds of integrations as well?

Greg Frenette: Absolutely! One of the real beauties of Ford partnering with a number of utilities across North America is we are exploring those sorts of scenarios and so this whole idea of mobile billing, how that occurs how it takes place is something we are exploring along with a number of other interface opportunities and challenges that we want to face and work out together.

Tom Raftery: Another issue that people raise around electric vehicles is if an electric vehicle is being charged by a utility who are burning coal are they outputting more CO2 than they would if the same car was running off gas?

Greg Frenette: Well that scenario could certainly present itself. One of the things — one of the opportunities that may present itself in how consumers interact with the grid is you may dictate through your vehicles or through an interface at the meter — you may dictate that you want the greenest form of charging.

In other words you will dictate that you will charge at times when the least the amount of coal is being burnt and perhaps other sources of energy are being made available to the grid. So that sort of thinking is something that we are currently engaged at. At the end of the day, though, the total environmental solution is more than a solution at the tailpipe of the vehicle. It has to be what we call a wells-to-wheels solution, and so the energy industry sees the role, I think, they need to play in helping drive emissions down, helping us really improve the environment together.

Tom Raftery: Okay, one last question Greg. When will I see a Ford Battery Electric Vehicle in the showroom?

Greg Frenette: Well, our current plans, today, call for Ford Transit Connect Battery Electric Vehicles to begin coming off our production line at the end of next year (2010).

The following year, 2011, we are currently scheduled to be putting out a full electric Ford Focus Battery Electric Vehicle and then our plans beyond then, 2012 and beyond, call for a plug-in hybrid, a version of the vehicles that we are currently running in demonstration today. So we are not talking about a long-term reality here; what we are really talking about is vehicles that are currently under design and development and will be deployed out in to the public very shortly.

Tom Raftery: Superb Greg, that’s been fantastic. Thanks for agreeing to come on the show.

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Guido Bartels of GridWise and IBM discusses Smart Grids with GreenMonk

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High Voltage power line

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)

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US Smart Grid future looking bright?

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Barack Obama in shades

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:

  • $1 billion for smart meters and in-home display technologies
  • $400 million for grid modernization projects to make electricity distribution and transmission more efficient with digital monitoring and increased grid automation
  • $2 billion, the bulk of the monies, is going to projects which help integrate all the various components of smart grids so they can interoperate seamlessly and
  • $25 million to help expand the manufacturing base of companies that can produce the smart meters, smart appliances, synchrophasors, smart transformers, and other components for smart grid systems

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!

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Alcatel-Lucent partners to rollout smart grid in Germany

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Alcatel

Photo credit Kaptain Kobold

Alcatel-Lucent announced that it has signed an agreement with the German municipal utility Stadtwerke Pasewalk to implement smart meter operation services.

New European Union rules, which come into effect on January 1 2010, will require consumption dependent billing of gas, electricity and water and by utilities. The Alcatel-Lucent solution being used here is designed to address that legislation. Interestingly, according to the release, Stadtwerke Pasewalk customers will be given a home energy monitor which will enable them to see their energy consumption in real-time and optimise it accordingly. There are no details on whether there are plans to automate the in-home energy reductions, nor do they talk about whether the the meters can be updated remotely.

Alcatel Lucent have partnered with Vodafone Germany, DIEHL Energy Solutions and SIV AG for this project. Alcatel Lucent will operate the central meter data management system to monitor and control the smart meters, Vodafone will provide communications, DIEHL Energy Solutions will deliver the smart meter systems while SIV will provide the backend ERP system to handle the data. The SIV ERP system (kVASy) is based on an Oracle database.

Stadtwerke Pasewalk is one of nearly 900 utility companies in Germany (!) and is quite small with only 12,000 meters so this is akin to a trial-sized project.

The involvement of so many partners, in even this modest rollout, is a clear indicator of just how complex smart grids can be to implement. Partnerships (and interoperability) amongst smart grid solution vendors will be critical to the success of these ventures.

The skills learnt here will benefit not just Stadtwerke Pasewalk and its customers, but all of the companies involved as they move onto future larger smart grid projects.

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The importance of open standards for broad smart grid adoption

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Standards

Photo credit Leo Reynolds

If you are not sure why open standards are important, you need to read this quote from the opening address of the The Southern African Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference 2005, by then Minister of Science and Technology, Mosibudi Mangena:

The tsunami that devastated South Eastern Asian countries and the north-eastern parts of Africa, is perhaps the most graphic, albeit unfortunate, demonstration of the need for global collaboration, and open ICT standards. The incalculable loss of life and damage to property was exacerbated by the fact that responding agencies and non-governmental groups were unable to share information vital to the rescue effort. Each was using different data and document formats. Relief was slowed, and coordination complicated.

If the Internet weren’t built on open standards we might have found ourselves in a situation where you’d need an IBM browser to look at the IBM website, an HP browser to look at the HP site, a Microsoft browser to view the Microsoft site and so on. In fact it is the very openness of the standards on the internet which has led to its explosive growth and ubiquity.

Proprietary standards lead to vendor lock-in and to the crazy situation where if, for instance you buy a Sony digital camera, it typically uses Memory Stick cards that can be acquired only from Sony and a few select licensees, and this memory is typically much more expensive than alternative memory types available from multiple sources but which won’t work in Sony cameras.

In the Smart Grid space, standards are also extremely important. We need ensure that there is no vendor lock-in (i.e. if a utility has GE transformers, they need to be free to buy their smart meters from any smart meter vendor, not just GE, for example).

One of the most successful of the open standards has been TCP/IP, the protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched network, like the Internet or almost all home or company networks. The next incarnation of TCP/IP is called IPv6. The advantage IPv6 has is that it allows far more items to be networked than is currently possible and that will be vital if we are to start networking the appliances in our house so they can participate in the Smart Grid. This is why companies like Cisco, who have no history in the energy space, are going to have a part to play in the roll-out of Smart Grids. Indeed Cisco have been talking up the importance of IPv6 for Smart Grids and creating ecosystems “to facilitate the adoption of Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications standards for smart grids.”

This explains why standards and interoperability are becoming really hot topics in the Smart Grid space at the minute. In fact that’s what the majority of the company announcements from last week’s Gridweek conference were about:

By far the most important announcement around Smart Grid standards though wasn’t from a company, it was from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They presented for public comment a major new report on Smart Grid interoperability standards. That this document was launched by US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke should be an indication, not just of the importance of standards for Smart Grids but fortunately, just how important the Obama administration perceives them to be as well!

Cisco famously said that the Smart Grid space:

will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than the Internet. If you think about it, some homes have Internet access, but some don’t. Everyone has electricity access–all of those homes could potentially be connected

The only way Smart Grids will achieve that scale is if the standards required for that growth are drawn up and adopted.