In warming climate, smart grid is vital

Published Monday, 1st November 2010

When making the case for an upgraded infrastructure, the cheerleaders of smart-grid technology usually point to benefits like improved energy efficiency and better integration of renewable power sources. One advantage that doesn’t always get mentioned first, though, could prove to be a big one in a world facing a more unstable climate: more grid resilience in the wake of natural disasters.

In fact, utility companies that have adopted smarter technologies have already seen the difference these improvements can make during disasters.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast in 2005, Sensus’ advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) technology helped speed up the recovery of some water, gas and electricity services in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The smart technology enabled crews to bring back service to some 600 square miles in New Orleans without having to make any site visits. And even in Biloxi, Mississippi, where three base stations were washed away by the storm surge, 300 square miles of service area was recovered by attaching a Sensus base station to a remaining undamaged utility tower. Within 10 days, utilities using the AMI technology could read and control meters even while other communications by landline or mobile phones remained all but impossible.

Smart technologies came to the rescue again last week, when severe storms rolled through the US Southeast.

“Managing the inconvenience and danger of power outages caused by storms … is a great challenge for the utility industry,” said Luke Clemente, general manager, metering and sensing systems-digital energy for GE Energy Services. “As Mother Nature turns out the lights across the country, we are reminded of the broader impact that a smarter grid can have on consumers. Today’s smart grid solutions can reduce the number of customers affected by power outages and minimise the impact of outages that do occur by getting power online quicker than ever before.”

With an ageing power grid still the norm in many parts, today can’t really see what’s happening out in the field without a crew physically at a trouble spot. In fact, the first indications of an outage typically come when a customer calls to complain that the lights are out.

“The smart grid helps utilities better manage resources,” says Randolph Wheatley, vice president of marketing and customer operations for Sensus. “It helps in multiple dimensions. It allows for rapid detection and isolation of events.”

Such improved awareness can help not only during storm-caused outages, but during, for example, extreme heat waves that put added pressure on the grid.

“Smart grid technology will enable utilities to better control peak demand such that it doesn’t overwhelm the grid,” Wheatley says. That ability could prove vital as heat waves become more frequent and severe.

While the longer-term benefits of a smarter energy infrastructure might be hard to argue with, utilities will increasingly realise the shorter-term payoffs also make the investment worthwhile, he adds. Those payoffs come in the form of real-time and two-way communication with customers, improved operating efficiencies and lower carbon footprints.

For now, the utilities investing the most in smart technologies tend to more often be in places where green government legislation is spurring on such development. Over time, however, Wheatley believes the trend will accelerate across the board.

“With any significant change in an industry, there’s a leading edge (and then) followers and late adopters,” he says. As large, early deployments — such as that now under way by the Southern Company — bear fruit, “others can sit back and see those data points validated,” Wheatley says.

“In every instance as we go through the decision process, we inevitably have to go through a business case analysis,” he says. “It has to show there is a positive net effect.”

In a world of growing climate instability, that effect could prove even more beneficial to utilities and customers alike.

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