Energy Efficiency Finding New Approaches


 
Author: Richard Schlesinger
Location: New York
Date: 2013-08-29

Unquestionably, the power industry needs to cut emissions, modernize the grid and increase capacity as the economy recovers and demand grows. The public conversation inevitably turns to renewable sources, substituting gas for coal, smart grid innovations and the ever-green topic of a nuclear renaissance. Often lost in the discussion is the topic of efficiency.

When the public thinks about energy efficiency, it generally thinks about improving home insulation and switching to more efficient appliances and lighting. Numerous government programs, mostly in the form of incentives, are designed to encourage taking those steps. Utilities generally participate to some extent, often through education programs and, in the case of central HVAC systems, incentives.

Smart meters have also received considerable attention. Their deployment continues and is acceler¬ating in some areas. But the real payback awaits the broad availability of appliances that can communicate with the grid, and these are unlikely to be deployed in large numbers for years. Some programs using smart meters are in place that allow utilities to control central heating and cooling systems, cycling them or adjusting thermostats in exchange for pricing incen¬tives. However, they are not widely deployed, even in areas where smart meters are installed. They have sometimes met with customer resistance, mainly over privacy concerns.

Most of the pilot programs to manage demand are on the residential side. Dealing with large-scale commercial or industrial customers can be challenging for a utility, which may not have the industry-specific knowledge to identify likely areas where efficiencies can be realized or the technical expertise to implement them. Increasingly, utilities are turning to outside firms that specialize in identifying and implementing energy efficiency in such industries.

AEP Texas, for instance, is experimenting with a load management program directed at agricultural customers, specifically targeting large-scale agricul¬tural irrigation. 

"Agricultural and irrigation pumping customers haven't participated in any of our demand-response programs, so this is an attempt to target them," said Billy G. Berny, manager of energy efficien¬cy and demand response for AEP Texas. An outside implementer will install hardware and software to remotely manage a partici¬pating customer's pumping system. When ERCOT, the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, predicts a high peak-demand day, the implement¬er will notify the customer that it will need to curtail its pumping system at a given time for a certain period. AEP will then monitor usage and pay the implementer, who will pass some of the savings to the end user.

A similar efficiency program targets small commer¬cial facilities, those with peak summer demand of less than 100 kilowatts, such as convenience stores and retail facilities. Open, as the program is known, works with outside specialists and contractors to identify areas such as lighting, insulation and refrigeration, that are good candidates for improving energy efficiency. Another program, SCORE/CitySmart, targets K-12 schools and city government electric distribution customers and provides the expertise to help them benchmark current usage, create an energy master plan, identify and evaluate opportunities for energy efficiency measures and monitor savings in usage. AEP Texas uses CLEAR Result Consulting to imple¬ment the program.

The demand response approach to energy efficien¬cy generally requires the active participation of end users, but distribution companies have alternatives that don't depend on customer participation. Control¬ling voltage levels and reactive power - Volt-VAR - is fundamental to all electric transmission. 

AEP, along with a number of other utilities and distribution com¬panies, is running Volt-VAR demonstration projects to see how effective active management of Volt-VAR can be in increasing efficiency. "One of the neat things that differentiates this from some of the other energy efficiency programs is this doesn't require a decision by the customer," said Tom Weaver, AEP's manager of distribution system planning. "If they're on a system where Volt-VAR optimization is applied, they're going to participate, and they're probably not even going to know it."

Providing slightly lower voltage, but always within the regulatory standard of 114 volts to 126 volts, lowers power consumption without compro¬mising the performance of electrical devices. Motors, in fact, actually perform more efficiently at 115 volts than they do at 120 volts. Controlling the reactive power, the VAR factor, contributes additional efficien¬cy, especially on circuits with heavy motor loads. 

"It's particularly effective because everyone on the system participates and everybody's service remains intact. The customer's air conditioner runs as much as they want. There's no change in the thermostat. We're not asking for behavioral change," Weaver explained.Important advances in energy efficiency are also being achieved on the transmission end. The Bonneville Power Administration is the federal agency based in the Pacific Northwest that markets wholesale power and operates and maintains about three-fourths of the high-power transmission in its service territory. Part of its mandate is to encourage renewable sources and promote energy efficiency.

EPRI is working on a broad spectrum of new tech¬nologies to increase energy efficiency. Revis James, director of EPRI's Generation R&D Sector, points to the broad spectrum of EPRI research on increasing efficiency in every stage of the power process, from generation to end-use distribution. 

"You can't pinpoint one factor as the dominant focus of research right now," he said. "We're doing research to design materi¬als for pipes and pumps, for instance, that can func¬tion at higher temperatures and pressures to create larger differentials that would yield greater efficiency, but it's a long-term process. We're also looking for ways to cool steam more effectively, which again would yield greater efficiency, particularly for coal and nuclear plants, which account for 50 to 60 percent of our capacity, so there's a big bang for the buck there." Cooling technology, according to James, is further advanced than materials research, and is already in place in some plants.

At the end of the line, inte¬gration of distributed energy generation and storage will play a major role in increas¬ing overall energy efficiency. But this area, too, is in the basic-research phase. "There are two fundamental param-eters," James said. "One is how much energy you can store. The other, which is just as important, is how fast you can discharge the energy you've stored and then recharge it. There are numerous approaches: com¬pressing air, using hydro storage, and employing batteries. The home run would be a very efficient battery technology so you could develop scalable storage. But that's a material science and basic physics issue. And that's going to take some time."

Time and money. The business case for energy efficiency is complex. It's easy to see the case for cutting generating costs. But when it comes to cutting demand or increasing transmission efficiency, the profit motive generally won't suffice. Utilities are driven to improve efficiency as much by regulatory demands for increased efficiency and the mandated move toward renewable sources as they are by the possibil¬ity of increasing profits or cutting the need to invest in increased capacity.

 

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