The emerging smart grid encompasses more technology, costs and complexity than the traditional utility distribution network.
Smart grids will enable utility companies to anticipate and shape consumer demand for electrical power and optimize their own power delivery and reliability.
A new generation of embedded computing, advanced metering and data management technologies make this possible. Smart grid projects can be derailed easily, however, with the wrong course of action.
Hewlett-Packard Co. applied its extensive smart grid experience alongside major utilities to identify the seven sins of smart grid and approaches to progress.
No. 1: The Same Old Mindset
Historically utilities employed conservative approaches to ensure continuity and reliability, but smart grid technology is profoundly disruptive. It changes every process in the organization.
Utilities must recognize these changes and understand smart grid's pervasive impact. Smart grid implementations are a transformational event for customers, the grid and utility organizations.
The transition to smart grid for utilities will be as dramatic as the shift from landlines to mobile phones was for telecom.
The three fundamental areas of impact to the utility business include:
AMI/SMI Field Environment. With today's smart meters, utilities have advanced capabilities to monitor multiple types of energy usage in defined time periods. Equipped with new communications technologies, smart meters can exchange energy consumption and power control information with a utility company within seconds. Smart meter communications technologies enable smart grids to cover large, diverse, geographical areas. The number of communicating devices can increase most utilities' network management 1,000 times.
Systems Environment. When most utilities' major systems environments were designed 20 or 30 years ago, the primary objective was reliability and simplicity. New smart grid systems provide communications and command – and – control functions required to support smart meters. Examples of these new systems are meter data management systems, automated data collection systems, distribution management systems and demand management systems. Utilities' legacy systems will require considerable modification to handle the granularity, volume and timeliness of new data and will require specific integration to leverage the new smart grid systems' business value.
Customer Experience Environment. With smart grid technology, customers will be armed with tools and information to help utilities reduce drastically demand spikes and drive energy conservation. Therefore, utilities will enter a new realm of customer relationships. Gone are monthly paper bills and rare outage calls. Customers will demand daily, if not hourly, interaction with utility providers through websites, portals, in – home – displays, communicating thermostats, mobile phones, Web applications and automated home energy management systems. Home area networks (HANs) will integrate the customers' in – home experiences with components that send and receive real – time information from utilities and third – party providers. In addition, through the Internet, customers will have access to a secure utility portal to monitor and compare detailed energy consumption.
Internally, utilities must clearly identify how the smart grid will impact all areas of their organizations and corresponding processes with process analysis methodology. This identifies tangible and familiar smart meter implementation components and correlates them with common organizational operational processes. This methodology will show how smart grid components will impact all stakeholders.
No. 2: Smart Grid Immaturity
To achieve appropriate smart grid maturity, it is necessary to identify upfront a smart grid project's primary objective.
The difference between securing cost savings through automated meter readings and implementing advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) to enhance customer relations and conservation capabilities is immense.
The sin is to confuse goals with what is ready to implement. Smart grid vision and maturity builds from the simple to the complex in stages that build upon one other, like in the chart.Introducing communications into a digital electronic meter– a smart meter – is the first and most basic smart grid phase. Automated reading systems can gather time-based electric consumption information and deliver granular information to utilities without reading meters on site.
During the second phase, AMI improves communications considerably using fixed – network infrastructures.
Fixed (in – place, always – on) communication allows utilities to pull energy consumption data anytime and allows them to send information down through the meter to share with homeowners or to the meter for control functions.
The real – time sense and respond phase of smart grid maturity includes bidirectional device communication applied to customers and devices that control power flow in the electric grids, such as wires, transformers and switching stations.
All grid network devices deliver consumption information and relay how the network is responding. They also empower utilities to adjust network operations and optimize power delivery and reliability.
The proactive control phase of smart grid maturity is the next phase, characterized by the addition of significant instrumentation, monitoring and control devices to the grid.
These devices feed operational data into real – time analytic models that adjust grid control parameters to optimize power delivery and reliability. This operational model data also is used to model future states of the grid given forecast (weather, fuel prices, spot market prices, transmission anomalies, etc.) events.Technology and integration challenges currently limit progress into a completely modeled environment, but just as cloud computing was a distant utopia 10 years ago, this may come to pass.