Grid ComForum

February 2-3, 2010, Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California

Grid ComForum targets the needs of electric power industry managers and executives responsible for the deployment of smart grid technology, with a particular focus on the communications layer. Grid ComForum provides a unique focus on technology selection and management as well as addresses business case development, market drivers and marketing, operations, and policy concerns.

Lunch Keynote: Smart Grid: Evolving the Energy Industry

Marie Hattar, VP Smart Grid Marketing, Cisco

  • Smart Grid investments $200 billion worldwide by 2015 (Pike Research, Dec 28, 2009)
  • EVs great way to store energy and absorb renewable electricity

Plug-in Electric Vehicles and the Dynamic Smart Grid

Chairperson

  • Robert Swiatkowski, Regional Vice President of Smart Grid Solutions, Elster Solutions

Speakers

  • Erfan Ibrahim, Technical Executive in the Intelligrid program area of the Power Delivery & Utilization Sector
    Electic Power Research Institute (EPRI)
  • Alex Fedosseev, SVP Product Management, 4Home
  • Saul Zambrano, Director, Clean Air Transportation, Pacific Gas and Electric Company

The advent of the Plug-in Electric Vehicles will introduce uncharted loads and shift fueling demands from the gasoline fueling to the grid. A small Plug-in Electric Vehicle will demand on average 7 kWh to recharge a car for 22 – 45 km. If each of one million household eventually has two PEV, charging PEVs will require 14,000 mWh. The PEV is a large mobile electric load and presents an unpredictable demand on the grid. While transmission engineers can deliver energy to PEV charging stations for in the home and at commercial sites, they cannot know the patterns of usage at charging stations leading to blackouts and/or damaged equipment.

Obviously, an intelligent approach and application of new technology will be required to allow utilities to change their static grid to a dynamic grid by controlling PEV charging stations and capacitor banks as well as communicating dynamic rates and non-charge times. Utilities will also be required to add sensing devices to understand and balance the grid real time as well as technology to communicate to the end consumer on rate and non charging times. All of this will need to be interlaced with Smart Grid and Smart Metering technology tying residential and commercial & industrial demands in with PEV.

Robert Swiatkowski, Elster

  • Grid today
    • Static
    • Load limited
    • Out of date and infrastructure is aging
    • Generation is centrally located
    • Blind: Utilities cannot see from substations into home or commercial or industrial sites
    • Information is not real-time
    • No communication into end-point
    • Haven’t implement time-of-use (TOU) in home
  • Future Grid must
    • Process in real time the demand througout the service territory (temperature, clouds, wind)
    • Anticipate the demand throughout the territory
    • Communicate usage, pricing and control demand to end users
    • Authenticate foreign users (EVs that plug-in elsewhere)
    • Process in real time distributed generation through the service territory
    • Anticipate distributed generation
    • Anticipate generation based on demand to distributed generation
    • Prioritize distribution for emergencies

Erfan Ibrahim, EPRI

  • Jury still out on the IQ of the smart grid
  • Challenge is that there will be a huge paradigm shift to move to smart grid and we need to be ready for shift
  • For 100 years, electric distribution followed ohms and kirchoffs laws and flowed down from high potential to lower potential – downhill from generator to user
  • CO2 produced mainly by transportation and electricity generation
  • All renewable energy we have today is in single digit percent wise
  • Renewable percentage is low enough that variability can be handled by current grid
  • Control and information is good to and from substations (DNB3 with EMS)
  • Outside of that communication is not good (cell phone coverage is bad). Companies like Elster developing mesh to overcome that
  • We have a lot of high-tech people trying to go into this market that don’t understand the mindset of utility people that are facing these problems everyday
  • Opportunity is amazing. If we work this out and have true two-way electric and communication flow and manage it in a scalable way
  • Get involved with UCA Users Group  that deals with real-time utility communication standards
  • NIST interoperability roadmap project, Smart Grid panel
  • Must attend events: Distributek, Connectivity Week, Grid Week,?

Saul Zambrano, PG&E

  • Looks at products that they can bring to their customers to handle demand utilitization
  • Doesn’t work fast: quantitatively focused, do their research, look at business case, bring their case to regulators
  • Other progressive utilities: Boston, San Diego
  • Core utility principles: keep the lights on and do it safely
  • PEV charging a large load – 240v at 30a comparable to average peak summer load of a single home
  • Utility prefers 4 hour fast charge in order to manage the load
  • If they know demand is coming, they can manage it (What about Peak Oil spike for EVs?)
  • Distribution load management is critical
  • The have peakers that operate only 10 hours per year
  • Issues
    • Peak vs off-peak is incredibly important
    • Types of transformers at DPA (underground, overhead & size)
    • HVAC vs. Non HVAC DPA
  • Smart charger with an integrative veiw of transformer performance is critical
  • PG&E smart meter communication is mesh – cheaper than cellular and better coverage
  • Cars will be ready Q4 2010 and PG&E is getting ready
  • J1772 plug is now standard
  • PG&E is driving standards based solutions
  • Other standards: 2847 car to grid, HAN smart energy 2.0
  • Done deploying smart meters by 2011.
  • For EV deployment, they care about
    • Real time load mgmt software
    • AMI SmartGrid Architecture
    • Smart (Com) EVSE (EV charging station)
    • On board PEV telematics (finding charging stations)
  • Load Mgmt SW post launch
    • Transformer monitoring
    • NOC visualization
    • TRP/DR signaling
    • Scalable/secure architecture
  • EVSE
    • Pre launch: Low volume, non networked, pre standards
    • Post launch: Volume economics, networked, SAE/ISO/SG standards
  • Can’t support any vendors that don’t have scalable and secure solution

Alex Fedosseev, 4Home

  • 4Home four years old company in Sunnyvale doing software platform for the connected home
  • NYISO estimate: 1.5 million PHEVs by 2016, 50 million by 2030
  • Demand response possibilities in a home: EVs, HVAC, Water heaters, Pool pumps

Questions

  • Can PG&E handle EVs that are coming? Saul. Yes. EVs will be available in certain, engaged areas. Gas prices will make a big difference in EV adoption rates. Erfan. Dichotomy: young people are eco-friendly but don’t have money to pay for EVs, kids of wealthy people are not as eco-friendly although they could afford EVs.
  • How will utils make sure EVs are charged between 1am and 4am?: Saul. Utilities never takes control of customers electricity consumption (except in emergency). PG&E will give consumer a choice, provide information on decisions they make, and give them financial incentives to charge off-peak.

 

Integrating Energy Efficiency and Demand Response

Chairperson

Speakers

  • Aloke Gupta, Senior Energy Analyst, California Public Utilities Commission, 415-703-5239, ag2@cpuc.ca.gov
  • Len Pettis, Chief of Plant, Energy and Utilities, California State University (Not Present)
  • Ken Abreu, Principal Regulatory Analyst, Pacific Gas and Electric Company

DR = Demand Response, temporary peak reduction EE = Energy Efficiency

Aloke Gupta, CPUC

  • CPUC sets price of electricity, how much utilities can make and how much they can spend
  • Budgets
    • Energy Efficiency $3.1 billion (2010 to 2012)
    • Demand Response $0.36B (2009 to 2011)
    • Distributed generation (Solar rooftops) $2.0B (over 10 years to 2017)
    • Low income program $0.87B
  • Demand response goal: 5% of system peak load (2.5 GW)
  • 2GW of solar rooftop by 2017 (CSI program)
  • They define “demand response” as shifting the demand in time
  • Last year CPUC ordered utilities to work on permanent load shifting proposal
  • 2010 IOUs required to provide data to 3rd party at customer request (Google PowerMeter)
  • 2010 IOS requited to transmit electricity prices
  • 2011 IOUs required to access usage data in real-time

Ken Abreu, PG&E Regulatory Analyst

  • No DR dept at PG&E: it is now integrated with EE and other energy programs

Rick Counihan, EnerNOC

  • Started as demand response firm in 2001
  • Has over 3,000 MW of load to drop over US and Canada over 5,600 commercial/industrial sites (as of 9/30/09)
  • Close to 415 employees
  • Branched out to energy efficiency services to commercial and industrial customers
  • Top 10% of peak demand occurs less than 1% of the time. 10% of electric infrastructure built to satisfy this 1%
  • Demand response required real-time metering and this led to moving into energy efficiency
  • BMCx = Monitoring based commission (continuous commission)
Revised on May 5, 2010 20:02:43 by Max Dunn (69.226.224.196)