By Web Master, 12-11-09
Imagine going to the gas station to fill up your car. You fill your tank but there is nothing on the pump to tell you the price per gallon or how many gallons you put in your tank. Instead of paying right there, you drive away and the oil company sends you a bill at the end of the month. By the time you know that price has gone up, you have already bought and used the gas … and now you just have to pay for it. Not a very consumer friendly way to do business.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how electric utilities work. The sad truth is that the electric grid in the U.S. is aging and based on a business model from a bygone era. If Thomas Edison came back to life today he would know and understand all of the basic pieces of the U.S. electric grid. Compare that to the telecommunications industry. It’s a safe bet that Alexander Graham Bell would be astonished by cell phones, the Internet and most other advancements we have seen in telecommunications.
The good news is that the electric power industry is changing. It is using advanced communications technology to make the system more and more efficient. As a whole, this group of technologies is referred to as “Smart Grid.” And Flathead Electric and NorthWestern Energy are leading the way here in Montana. Both are participating in The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project. The goal of the project is to put these new technologies to the test and evaluate potential benefits for consumers. There are lots of different things in the term “Smart Grid.” Here are just a few.
Smart Meters: Smart meters allow consumers to see exactly how much power they are using at any point in time. In the near future people will save money by doing power intensive things like drying clothes at different times of day when power prices are lower. More advanced smart meters can be programmed to interact with appliances and automatically adjust power consumption based on the price of power. People use less power and pay less for the power they do use. Using smart meters, utilities around the country are able to cut costs and improve customer service.
Load Management: Utilities decide how many power plants to build by determining how much power is needed to meet the absolute highest demand possible. The utility builds or buys whatever mix of power generators they need to cover that peak day or hour. It is a really expensive system that results in building power plants that don’t run very much of the time. Using smart grid technologies like smart meters, utilities are able to develop strategies to reduce that peak demand. That means they have to build or buy less electricity and that saves a lot of money.
Renewable Power: We all know that Montana has a lot of clean, renewable sources of power like wind and solar. From better forecasting of wind patterns to using computers to instantaneously adjust the power grid across long distances, smart grid technology makes these sources of power more efficient and more reliable.
Energy Storage: If we could store power when it is being produced cheaply “off peak” and then use it during periods of high demand, everyone would save a lot of money and the power system would run much more efficiently. Some of our existing hydro-electric systems use this strategy to keep costs down. From batteries to fly-wheels, there are numerous technologies which are just reaching the market which offer great promise for energy storage.
Plug-in hybrid vehicles: These vehicles will start coming off assembly lines in the next year. Their battery systems can be charged “off peak” at low cost. With smart grid technology, power can also be drawn from these batteries to provide power as needed in the grid when the cars are not in use but the batteries are fully charged.
These are just a few of the things that offer promise for the “Smart Grid.” It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But, the phone on our family ranch in 1970 had an eight-party line. We had one TV station that went off the air at 10 p.m. The first cell phones weighed about five pounds. Today we have BlackBerries and Ipods, Wi Fi and 200 channels on our televisions. It’s about time we see the same kind of technological innovation in the power grid. It is good news that Flathead Electric and Northwestern Energy are leading the way here in Montana.
Ken Toole is the vice chair of the Public Service Commission.
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