Earlier this month in Washington DC, utility executives shared the pains and triumphs in the turmoil that is today’s energy market. With a patchwork of regulatory frameworks across North America coupled with discouraging economics of many smart grid investments, utilities seem more disparate in projects and management than ever before.
Where one utility finds value, another finds a regulatory roadblock. Where a muni makes a great business case for demand response, an IOU faces natural flattening of demand and revenues. Out of the myriad of case studies, one theme emerged: the efficiency of the grid has the strongest business case with favorable payback.
Will this result in a shift of focus from smart meters to synchrophasors? Unlikely. Meters can be an important component of the networked grid. It is still in the utility’s best interest to keep educating customers on the benefits of smart meters for demand response, outage detection and more control over energy consumption. Indeed, market analysts estimate that 240 million smart meters will be implemented across Europe by 2020.
However, alongside customer advocacy discussions, distribution business managers shared plans for:
- Wider use of phasor measurements.
- Enabling demand response, storage and distributed energy resources.
- Turning data info useful information so that “smart” applications can prompt business decisions.
- Improved forecasting capabilities based on more granular and timely available data.
- Network control systems with near real-time analytics on grid performance.
- Asset health centers that aggregate sensor data for performance analytics and predictive modeling.
I left the conference with the impression that distributed generation is becoming more of a reality. It presents significant challenges for the utility, including protection and control, economic benefits model, variability of output, line worker safety, and infrastructure reliability. SAS recently answered questions about the impact of these changes on energy portfolio planning in this webinar on energy portfolio optimization hosted by Electric Light & Power.
