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Utilities leverage new technologies and analytics to shed more light on operations and customers.

Viewpoints

Industry Eye

Smart Grids: Powerful Idea

Utilities leverage new technologies and analytics to shed more light on operations and customers.

by Bruce Angelis

Utilities around the globe are deploying new technologies across their distribution systems and even into their customers’ homes and busi­nesses. These solutions deliver the smart grid promise of cleaner, more efficient generation and distribution of power, more reliable and consistent energy quality, and improved conservation by providing information to every user.

It’s a daunting challenge, but em­ploying a smart-grid infrastructure for measurement, control, communications and data processing can deliver enor­mous benefits. In many cases, achieving those benefits requires analyzing vast quantities of real-time and historical data, and streamlining business processes with automation never before ap­plied at this scale in utilities. It also calls for a new approach to data management.

Making Connections

Smart-grid initiatives leverage digital technology to deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers. They often include an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and meter data management that collect vast amounts of valuable energy usage information.

  • AMI has enabled a progression from manual meter reading each month or quarter to col­lecting and communicating that information every few hours or even minutes. It includes a smart meter and a two-way communications network that records and relays residential and commercial energy consumption and quality information to the utility at least daily for billing, monitoring, etc. Utilities without AMI rely on load profiling—as opposed to actual data—to monitor and forecast energy use and define conservation programs.
  • The primary role of meter data management is to securely and reliably store and manage the vast quantities of meter data AMI delivers. The system collects, validates and cleanses the data for more efficient billing and analysis.

Through AMI and meter data management, utilities can perform time-of-use-based billing and encourage energy conservation and load reduction.

—B.A.

This is why, in 2009, Itron partnered with Teradata to develop the Active Smart Grid Analytics solution to apply data warehousing best practices to this new, rapidly maturing area.

Huge Analytical Potential

Implementing an Active Smart Grid Analytics architecture helps utilities maximize the business benefits of their substantial intellectual and monetary investments in smart grid technologies, such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and meter data management. AMI and meter data management provide timely, high-quality smart meter data to the smart grid data warehouse. When these measurements (readings) and events (alarms such as outages) are com­bined with other types of data—weather, operational, other sensors, consumer, financial—the analytical potential grows exponentially. For example:

  • Real-time and historical trends and events are combined to help predict and avoid issues before they happen.
  • Comparative energy consumption analysis can help individuals utilize their smart meters to save money and natural resources.
  • Electric vehicles can participate in the grid by storing and then delivering energy during critical peak periods.

The smart grid must be able to accommodate new technologies. For instance, distribution automation (DA), an extension of intelligent control over grid functions from the sub-station to the distribution level and beyond, cre­ates a new flood of data. Analyzing DA data combined with usage and voltage measurements will yield huge opera­tional benefits.

A strategy based on federating silos of data will not work at this scale. A centralized data warehouse approach is needed from the start. A single, scal­able warehouse infrastructure, with a comprehensive data model designed for utility smart grid information, will accommodate the natural growth of data types, volumes and uses. Any strategy will require a large scale, multi-year IT infra­structure ramp-up, coinciding with the mass deployment of devices in the field. The Active Smart Grid Analytics architec­ture provides a more robust and flexible model to adjust to new and unforeseen demands for analytics and will be simpler to manage than a federated approach.

Everybody Benefits

Utilities embarking on a smart grid roadmap need a refer­ence architecture for managing and analyzing the various data sources of the grid. The Active Smart Grid Analytics solution can run complex queries for analyzing energy con­sumption, allowing utilities to:

  • Educate customers to understand how they use energy by providing analysis of their individual consumption patterns. This lets them see the positive impact they can make by shifting their energy demand from peak consumption to off-peak periods.
  • Anticipate, detect, diagnose and locate service inter­ruptions more quickly so dispatchers can send resources and workers into the field to correct the problems.
  • Notify customers of a service interruption by text mes­sage, e-mail or phone, and tell them when service is projected to be restored.
  • Encourage customers to participate in demand-response programs that reduce the load during peak consumption.
  • Enable planners to better predict asset loading, more accurately determine capacity additions and potential overloads, and manage voltage to conserve energy.
  • Empower transmission and distribution operators to adjust system flows to increase the loading of underuti­lized assets. Not adding load to already stressed assets lowers the probability of failure and extends service life.

—B.A.

Wide Range of Paybacks

Conducted in near real time, Active Smart Grid Analytics enables smarter, faster de­cision making. This approach can provide payback in several categories:

  • Asset management and optimiza­tion can be more fully utilized, including design improvement and investment planning. The ability to replace equipment before failure, for example, leads to better preparation and quality of service.
  • Operational efficiency includes im­proving power quality and enabling alternative energy sources and storage. The smart grid enables electric vehicles, solar and wind power and other sources that consume—but can also generate and store—electricity to provide it back to the grid, as needed.
  • Customer service and support can be enhanced through analysis of consumption patterns and changes in behavior to develop, communi­cate and improve conservation and efficiency programs.

Rising to the Challenge

Implementing a smart grid presents challenges in terms of meter deployment and operational efficiencies, but utilities taking on those challenges are looking forward. The realization that a new layer exists in the IT infrastructure, which is heavily analytic on large volumes of data, is becoming a mainstream notion.

Utilities need both the tools and a data warehouse to analyze and forecast consumption patterns to better manage the flow, transmission and distribution of electricity, and also plan for long-term capital upgrades. The time for Active Smart Grid Analytics is now.

Bruce Angelis is the managing director of technology and integrated systems for Itron, a lead­ing technology provider to the global energy and water industries.
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This article explores only part of the value in smart grids. The smart meter is only a tool to reduce billing costs and allow time of day pricing for utilities to reign in spot prices during peak demand. Most meters are a closed system, partly for security and partly to allow utilities to control the data. Most people do not understand that energy data actually belongs to the consumer, not the utility. As such smart meter mfgs like Itron need to provide direct access to energy usage to the consumer which can be easily accomplished if they would work in concert with Home Energy Management (HEM) vendors that can communicate using Wifi, BPL and Protocols like what Zigbee offers. With respect to smart grid data, the utilities need to understand the entire demand response equation, from energy grid sources, through their distribution network, transformer vaults and pole transformers and commercial switches. When you couple this with demand side energy such as wind and solar, the information flows become ver

8/8/2011 8:27:55 PM
— Anonymous