Whenever electric utility folks get together to talk about the “Smart Grid” – which includes many functioning parts, from transmission network automation on down to the so-called Smart Meters in your home – they usually describe about all the potential system benefits.  These range from reduced costs of labor to improved voltage control, and system diagnostics that might reduce outage impacts or even “self heal” problems.

One utility executive told me that the decision to install new remote-read meters was the easiest decision he ever had to make. Even though the capital investment was substantial, the new meters paid for themselves immediately in reduced need for meter-readers.

And yet, customers are still wary and uncertain what exactly the benefits will be for them.

Despite favorable benefit/cost ratios for the utility providers and vendors, just about every previous projection of adoption rates has proven way too optimistic.  “Customers just don’t perceive the benefits,” lamented Val Jensen, Vice President of Marketing and Environmental Programs for Commonwealth Edison, the huge Chicago-based utility.

Jensen was one of a half-dozen utility representatives on a panel during this past week’s Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL) 2011: Silicon Valley conference sponsored by Frost & Sullivan.  The San Jose confab brought together several hundred business leaders and product innovators. 

And while electric utilities are rarely perceived as leaders in product/service innovation, the prospects for smart grid advances and smart building management convergence warranted its own track of programming on the GIL 2011 conference agenda.

As a news professional, I kept listening for something new from the panel but mostly heard much of the same story about how these systems are supposed to make things better for the utility system, without a lot of emphasis on how they might actually provide benefits for consumers.

Of course, there is a connection at the network level. If system reliability can improve, then households and businesses might experience fewer outages, and see some cost reductions that translate to lower power bills, or at least slower rates of increase in rates.

What I did hear about was some new evidence about how these supposedly smarter systems are performing under extremely stressful situations.  We’ve had what I would consider an above-average number of system stresses this past summer – ranging from severe tropical storms to extended heat waves in Texas. Plus, just last week, an extensive power blackout that affected as many as 5 million power users in Arizona, California and Northern Mexico.  In particular, San Diego Gas & Electric lost power throughout its system.

So I asked the panel to describe how these smart grid technologies actually performed under stress. Are they, indeed, living up to their promised benefits at the system level?

Only two of the panelists took up my question.  Josh Gerber, SDG&E’s Smart Grid Lead Architect offered some insights into the recent Southland blackout events, while Hilda Pinnix-Ragland, Vice President of Corporate Public Affairs for Progress Energy (North Carolina and six other states), reflected on Hurricane Irene’s impacts on southeastern coastal areas.

The SDG&E blackout story is actually a piece of good news.

The forensics of the outage are still under investigation, but the fact that virtually all service to SDG&E’s 1.4 million customers was restored within 12 hours of the precipitating event showed how resilient the grid can be.

In summary, the system worked exactly as it should have.  The initial event caused major voltage fluctuations, which cascaded through the systems, knocking out power at a major nuclear facility and dozens of power generation stations. These are designed to shut down to prevent severe equipment damage.  This, in turn, caused the SDG&E control area to automatically separate (a.k.a. “island”) from the rest of the Western grid, preventing the blackout from spreading throughout the state and region.  And automated systems for “black starting” the local grid worked well enough to restore power much quicker than originally anticipated.

That’s not necessarily a new feature of the smart grid, but technological improvements and system upgrades have made islanding and restoration much faster and effective in recent years.

What was new is that this was the first major outage experienced by a utility that has a near complete installation of Smart Meters.  SDG&E currently has more than 99 percent of its customers on the new meters, Gerber reported.

One of the prospective benefits of Smart Meters is the interactivity and two-way information flow; a utility will be able to tell when an individual customer is offline, and when service is restored without having to send a service tech out to the site.

Obviously, with a universal outage, that benefit gets somewhat diluted. But SDG&E was able to tell that meters were automatically returning to service – reregistering with the system as power restored – at a clip of more than 50,000 per hour. That, in itself, is a success story for the new system, he indicated.

Hurricane Irene leaves a lasting impression.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, a number of state regulatory bodies have called for investigation of utility responses and extended outages.  If called upon to explain its actions, it seems Progress Energy will have a somewhat positive story to tell.

As the storm lashed coastal and urban areas, the utility was forced to shut down some distribution lines as poles were knocked down.  The major benefit of a smarter grid was that Progress utility operators were often able to switch feeder lines remotely, maintaining power flows where they might have been lost, and enabling controllers to restore service “a little faster,” Pinnix-Ragland reported.

“I don’t think we had devices on all our systems, but where we did have them, in urban areas, it worked,” she said. “We might need to wait two or three years to see the real value of the Smart Grid.” 

Find out more:

The California Independent System Operator and transmission regulators are conducting investigations into the blackout, which will likely offer more evidence of how automated systems performed during the event. Follow them via the CAISO web site:

http://www.caiso.com

SDG&E has a series of free “pod casts” detailing aspects of its Smart Meter deployment program.  You can download the presentations here:

http://www.smartgridupdate.com/distributionoptimization/landing-pod...

States including New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland are conducting investigations into extensive utility outages resulting from Hurricane Irene and other tropical storms this year.  Follow the news on Google.com. 

Arthur O’Donnell, The Energy Overseer, is an independent energy journalist and market analyst. Look for him at #energyoverseer on Twitter and at www.energyoverseer.com