Mayor Joyce Smith has just won re-election, unopposed, to a second term in office. In the past four years, a Smart Grid initiative she launched with the Common Council in her city has helped stabilize water and electricity prices and reduce the property tax rate.
All residents and the school system have access to low-cost wireless broadband Internet through a city-owned network. City departments—police and fire, public works, utilities—communicate better and function more efficiently. The city is earning accolades for conserving energy and water, for reducing its carbon footprint, and for community outreach and engagement programs that helped make the progress possible.
An influx of businesses to a new technology park has started. The population is growing, and surveys show high satisfaction with city services. The Smart Grid initiative came about with no up-front capital cost—and in fact will save the city $50,000 per year for the next 15 years. Now a new phase of the initiative promises even more benefits.
This particular city and its mayor are both fictitious, but the advantages of the Smart Grid concept for communities are very real.
Consider Cumberland, Maryland, where an infrastructure upgrade to accommodate new businesses and jobs included investment in a Smart Grid-style system with automated meter reading on a network that also provides citywide WiFi service. Those improvements were part of a $3.7 million project package that is expected to save $8 million in energy and operating costs over 15 years.
In Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the municipal utility installed new water and electric meters that allow automated reading on a fixed-base system. The 24,000 electric meters have two-way communication capability that in the future could help support demand response programs for commercial and industrial customers. The total $17.1 million package, which includes investments in building efficiency, comes with annual savings of $2 million for 10 years.
In the ways described here, and in other ways still being explored, the Smart Grid concept can help communities support sustainability’s triple bottom line of economic prosperity, environmental protection, and social benefit.
Smart Grid adherents include Gerry Smallegange, president and CEO of Burlington (Ontario, Canada) Hydro Electric Inc. Writing in Municipal World magazine, he noted that Burlington, the sole shareholder of Burlington Hydro, “shares in the vision that a strong and progressive utility that invests in Smart Grid modernization and green energy contributes to the vitality of a city.”
What does it mean?
Intelligent energy efficiency in one powerful package
The Smart Grid is emerging as the premier solution to manage our nation’s energy needs
Today’s electrical grid — the infrastructure that delivers electricity from power generating plants to buildings — follows the same format as the one laid out in the days of Thomas Edison. Today the grid is evolving at a fast pace, but the same principles still apply.
Commercial buildings in the United States consume 18 percent of the country’s energy and 36 percent of its electricity. According to a recent Energy Efficiency Indicator study conducted by Johnson Controls, in partnership with the International Facility Management Association, 44 percent of facility executives in the United States believe smart building technology is among the top three technologies expected to have the greatest price-performance improvement over the next 10 years.
Increasing energy demands during peak time periods and varying production of renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, have rendered the grids of municipalities across the country less able to provide a stable stream of energy. By linking all supply and demand elements through intelligent, two-way communications, the grid can continually monitor energy demands and adjust delivery accordingly.
The Smart Grid concept takes modern-day technology information and applies it to the infrastructure that delivers our electricity. Communities can benefit from a more efficient and cost-effective energy system that supports a more sustainable future and fiscal responsibility. But all the benefits that the Smart Grid has to offer cannot be unlocked without smart buildings connected to it.
You can make your buildings smart by equipping it with some or all of the following advanced capabilities:
- Continuous two-way communication between the building and the grid
- Automatic demand response to dynamic pricing signals from the grid
- Optimized management of energy loads, on-site energy production, and storage
- Fully integrated control of lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, IT, and other systems, through information from security, scheduling, and weather data to maximize performance
- Automated measurement, verification and reporting of energy and greenhouse gas emissions savings
Combining Smart Grid and smart building technologies reduces energy costs and carbon footprints, while improving reliability and security. Facility managers, utilities and cities could avoid $33 billion in costs and eliminate 160 million tons of carbon emissions annually by 2030 by implementing Smart Grid technology into building infrastructures. Experts say the time to connect to the Smart Grid is now.
The term “Smart Grid” gets tossed about so freely that its basic meaning can get lost. The concept originated with the electric utility industry and refers to a system in which intelligent controls and automation tie the power grid together in an automated network that makes delivery of electricity more secure, reliable, economical, efficient, and environmentally friendly.
One essential element is the enabling of active consumer participation, so that power users can engage electricity markets and respond to supply and demand signals, for their own advantage and to the benefit of the larger system.
In the municipal utility context, the Smart Grid concept easily extends to electricity, gas and water. It allows two-way digital communication between the utility and customers, helping the utility operate its systems more efficiently, curtail waste, and hold down prices. Meanwhile, it helps customers see their own use and make informed choices on how much to use, when, and at what cost.
To appreciate Smart Grid, it is essential to understand the concept as more than smart metering technology, with which it is often confused. In fact, thinking of Smart Grid merely as smart meters is like thinking of the Internet solely as a place for document searches and e-mail.
The greatest value of Smart Grid technology may be the wired or wireless network on which it functions. That network can serve other community purposes limited only by the imagination. To cite just a few examples, it can provide:
- Efficiency-boosting communication to utility service people and between city departments.
- Monitoring and control for functions as diverse as facility security, lighting, and parking enforcement.
- A vehicle on which the utility can communicate with and educate residents, and where residents can communicate with each other and the world.
- A platform to collect and analyze information for improved planning, pricing, and customer support.
All that, combined with user fee and tax savings, appeals to homeowners and even more so to businesses considering where to locate or expand. While a smart utility system is not a sole deciding factor, it can help attract up-and-coming companies and their well-educated, well-paid employees.
Simply stated, progressive residents may prefer a city with an infrastructure that looks less like a traditional desktop PC and more like an iPad.
How does it work?
To understand how the Smart Grid concept works, it helps to start with a simple (not quite perfect) analogy to Smart Buildings. Here, building systems that control comfort, energy usage, security, life safety and other functions communicate with one another on one network, while the building communicates with the outside world.
Software then lets building systems optimize performance and cost automatically, reacting to signals such as changes in the weather or forecast increases in electricity prices. In addition, the system translates performance data into easy-to-read displays (dashboards) so that management can see opportunities for operational changes that reduce cost and increase efficiency.
From individual buildings, it is easy to extend the Smart Buildings concept to an entire campus, and from there to a Smart Grid system serving an entire city (although the dynamics are different when a municipal utility interacts with multiple diverse and independent users).
What does it include?
The Smart Grid is a major departure from the traditional structure of water, gas and electric utilities as separate collections of pipes and wires that need intensive physical inspection and at best provide one-way communication — via meters.
System Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) technology enables remote monitoring of field facilities such as electric substations and water towers, reservoirs and pump stations, but that communication typically stops well short of the end user: The interface with customers begins and ends with the meter.
Enter smart metering. The concept began with automated meter reading (AMR), in which meters transmit usage data to a mobile or fixed-base system, saving the cost of manual reading. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) goes farther, allowing utilities to collect more information, engage in two-way communication with customers, and even control certain customer-level functions on a more timely basis.
In the broadest sense, AMR/AMI helps communities cut costs and save money to invest in larger initiatives that attract business, promote job growth, and improve quality of life. The utility-specific benefits include improved billing accuracy and timeliness, better cash flow, limited tampering and theft and, in the case of water service, faster leak detection that can save costs, prevent property damage, and preserve system capacity.
But it is the communication network on which AMR/AMI functions that turns smart metering into Smart Grid. For only a modest investment, that wired, fiber-optic or wireless network can be “oversized” to provide a large array of other capabilities. Smart Grid’s concepts can help communities create economic stability and environmental protection.
Here ends Part I of our two-part series on Smart Grid systems. Part II will run in the next issue of Facilities Engineering Journal.
