Smart Meters Improving Grid Efficiency
Deployment of smart meters have now become
commonplace in many parts of the United States.
Approximately 33 percent of all U.S. households now have
a smart meter installed. California and Texas have led
these efforts with many other states expected to follow
suit.
The business drivers for these deployments are typically
the same, such as lower meter-reading costs, improved
outage and restoration management, and reduced truck
rolls. These operational savings have been proven time
and time again and there is little doubt that a portion
of the return on smart metering investments for these
functions will be monetized by the utility.
What is less clear - and where some of the smart
metering business cases start to differ - is how the
utility benefits the customer. Some would argue that by
simply giving the customer real-time access to smart
meter data via an in-home display, cellphone, or the
Internet, customers will modify their behavior to reduce
consumption or take advantage of lower pricing periods
brought about by special time-of-day-based pricing
programs. Or better yet, customers would let the utility
control the temperature or shut off equipment in the
home or business during a peak event.
The main issue with both of these demand-side management
approaches is that the customer participation rate is
hard to predict and typically extremely low in parts of
the country where electricity costs are still relatively
low, such as the Midwest and portions of the East Coast.
Realizing this, Dominion, one of the nation's largest
producers and transporters of energy based in Richmond,
Va., is taking a different approach.
As Dominion builds its business case for smart metering,
a large emphasis is placed on grid efficiency, meaning
applications that minimize the losses on the existing
distribution grid infrastructure. The richness, quality
and frequency of data coming out of today's modern smart
metering platforms is phenomenal. Data once only
available at the substation is now available at every
metering point in real time. This opens the door for
lots of grid efficiency applications.
Dominion has chosen to pursue conservation voltage
reduction as one of the first grid efficiency
applications that leverages this new data. CVR is a
technique some utilities have been experimenting with
for the past 30 years. It is a method of operating the
distribution system in the lower part of the allowable
voltage band.
For example, in the United States, the voltage at every
household outlet is a nominal 120 volts. The utility is
allowed to operate the system in a band that ranges from
114 to 126 volts. Simply delivering voltage to every
home in the lower part of this band - 114 to 118 volts -
will result in significant energy savings, mostly for
the consumer.
The previous methods of implementing CVR have been very
basic and consist of monitoring voltage at fixed points
on the grid, on the primary side of the distribution
transformer.
Over the past four years, Dominion has worked on
building and patenting a commercial product called EDGE
that redefines how CVR is implemented. EDGE leverages
the smart metering investment by reading voltage alarms
on every meter in the system, then dynamically choosing
what meters to monitor in real time to optimize the
voltage delivered to each customer. Because the
monitoring is done at customer sites through smart
metering, the accuracy and the savings are more
significant than in more conventional methods.
The EDGE technology has been deployed on 37 distribution
circuits at Dominion Virginia Power, the retail electric
utility of Dominion. The savings on some circuits have
ranged from $250,000 to $300,000 on an annual basis, and
90 percent of these savings go directly to the customer.
By optimizing the voltage delivered to every customer,
appliances, TVs, lights and other customer loads all run
more efficiently, resulting in a lower utility bill for
the customer without requiring any behavioral changes.
Because of this success of the deployment of EDGE,
Dominion has created a wholly owned subsidiary called
DVI to market and sell the product to other utilities
all over the world. DVI has partnered with some of the
leading smart metering and systems integration companies
in the industry to market, sell and deploy EDGE. These
companies include Landis+Gyr, Elster, Silver Spring
Networks and Lockheed Martin. DVI envisions a day where
every utility is considering deploying a smart metering
system that includes EDGE as one of the key grid
efficiency applications that helps make the business
case.
Because the opportunity is so large for the consumer to
monetize the smart metering investment without a
behavioral impact, the regulatory community will embrace
the EDGE application, leading to an accelerated adoption
of the technology. DVI is currently targeting those
states that are actively deploying smart meters and that
have energy efficiency goals that can be fulfilled
through the deployment of EDGE.
International opportunity for EDGE is significant. By
2020, more than 237 million smart meters will be
deployed across Europe and almost 90 percent of the
installed electricity meters in Western Europe will be
smart, according to a recent report from Pike Research.
This, combined with the Energy Efficiency Directive
recently approved by the European Commission that is
targeting 20 percent energy savings through energy
efficiency, sets the stage for the deployment of
grid-side efficiency technologies. DVI will be working
with utilities in the United Kingdom and other parts of
Europe to pursue these opportunities.
Smart metering is truly a breakthrough technology that
enables many applications and value streams. Implemented
properly, and in conjunction with a grid-side efficiency
program using a technology such as EDGE, both the
utility and its customers will monetize the benefits.
This story first appeared in EnergyBiz Magazine
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