US DOE, electricity industry report progress toward 'smart' grid

Washington (Platts)--14Oct2004

A US electric utility industry-Dept of Energy partnership has completed the
first phase of a project to develop a communications platform designed to help
the industry transform its aging transmission and distribution lines into a
modern, "smart" power grid, officials said Thursday. The "Intelligrid
Architecture," being developed by an Electric Power Research Institute-led
team, is essentially an operating system for an advanced grid, and officials
hope it eventually will be adopted broadly, allowing utilities or regional
transmission organizations to obtain real-time information about the grid and
permit consumers to reduce demand in response to market prices. In addition,
to modernizing the grid, which relies mostly on 40-year old technology, the
effort would allow for an easier expansion of transmission, which has not kept
up with demand growth for a decade, EPRI said.

Project participants have identified the technical requirements for the
architecture and a "vision" of an interstate electricity superhighway
supported by the architecture, which allows the integration of information
technologies (IT) with utility T&D systems, officials said at a Washington
briefing. This integration would help utilities improve their ability to
manage the grid in something closer to real-time. 

EPRI's Clark Gellings said that at best, utililties now can see changes on the
grid on a 50-second delay. The addition of more IT also would make the grid
more secure from cyber and physical attacks. Improving the real-time
capabilities and reducing demand also will improve reliability and
"recoverability" of the grid from blackouts, the partners said. Project
partners hope utilities will gradually add new IT capabilities to the grid as
they upgrade transmission and distribution. Utilities spend about $3.5-bil per
year on IT and a total of $20-bil on grid upgrades, and could use that to
support Intelligrid, officials said.

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