During a recent thunderstorm, a power surge fried the motor of my pool pump.  With prime algae-growing season nearly upon us in Texas, this was suboptimal timing.  Still, being a smart grid researcher, I thought I’d write to my co-operative power supplier, CoServ, and find out what happened.  So I sent a short note via their “Contact Us” web page, asking if they could look into their distribution management system for that Sunday morning and see if there had been a power swell in my neighborhood.  This was purely out of curiosity – this is what I do for a living, right?  Here’s the reply that I received about 4 days later:

 Thank you for taking the time to contact CoServ Electric. As you are aware there were adverse weather conditions in your area at the time of the service abnormalities.

CoServ Electric works hard to ensure all our members receive reliable service. However, because of the nature of the electric utility industry, continuous service cannot be guaranteed. (For example, situations involving animals on the lines, unforeseeable equipment issues, or weather events such as happened in your case.) Because this event was an “Act of God” and not something we could have foreseen or prevented, we cannot accept liability for any reported damage. We recommend contacting a qualified electrician to make sure your electric service beyond the point of service (the electric meter) is properly protected from common outside disturbances.

Thank you again for your report and for allowing us to serve you as a member of CoServ Electric. If you would like to discuss this situation further, feel free to contact me.

Okay, I admit that lots of people walk around with an entitlement mentality.  Still, it would never occur to me that my power utility is responsible for lightning strikes.  Is CoServ up there in the sky hurling thunderbolts at my pool?  Of course not.  They bear no liability for the pump.  So why such a defensive response?

Litigation Phobia

Here’s my theory: because their lawyers made them to do it.  In its 108-page tariff for electric service, CoServ already states that it is not responsible for acts of God.  Nor should it be.  Making any utility liable for all acts of God in its service area would most likely render that utility bankrupt.

And that’s the problem.  I have seen (but will not link here) job postings for “NERC Compliance Manager” where one of the essential candidate requirements is a law degree.  An analysis of NERC CIP v4, which added additional clarification of the term “critical cyber asset” (CCA), shows 17 new clauses to define a CCA.  Each of those clauses gives a utility enough wiggle room in a courtroom to escape penalty.

I’m currently researching cyber security for smart grid telecommunications.  As ever, the overriding investment theme for cyber security emerges as avoidance of fines or litigation.  After 23 research interviews I have a consensus response that there are a handful of utilities in the United States that proactively address cyber security, in each case because of a single individual that really cares.  The remaining utilities are characterized by my contacts as doing the minimum necessary to avoid legal consequences.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for keeping our utilities healthy financially.  From a purely selfish perspective, researching those utilities puts bread on my table.  But – can we please focus on operations and reliability, not legal ramifications?

Utilities want to know if vendors are overselling their wares.  Are vendors making commitments that that they really should not?  Sometimes it’s hard to know what a product will actually do – or not do – until it’s installed and running.  So most buyers will try to assure themselves that the product – hardware or software – will do what it says on the label.

But there’s another side that gets less attention: do vendors underplay the difficulty of living with a product?   As Calvin once explained to Hobbes, there’s a big difference between getting something and having something.  After the discussion session at a recent smart grid conference, I understand that having meter data management (MDM) can be more complicated than buyers may grasp during the acquisition cycle.

At the conference session, I joined five utility executives discussing their experiences implementing MDM.  The group was given a preset list of questions to discuss.  The first, “What have you learned from going beyond billing?” resulted in a bunch of blank stares.  The reason: that’s all these utilities have done with MDM – generate bills.  There is little “beyond billing” yet.

Perhaps the most common theme of the discussion was the difficulty of installing MDM and then integrating it with other applications.  All of the participants felt that this aspect had been underplayed by their vendors during the MDM purchase cycle.  Integration of MDM to other applications such as energy management, outage management, or customer information systems, has proven far more difficult than expected.

Response Times Slowed

All five utility officials were also dissatisfied with their MDM’s reporting capabilities.  Several utilities had reinstalled legacy reporting systems, piping the data from the new MDM back to the reinstalled legacy systems.  The group also wanted a separate replicated MDM database for reporting because running complex analyses against the online database significantly slows the response to real-time queries – usually driven by customer portals on the Internet or help desk agents on a call.

Everyone present agreed that MDM should be done before a smart meter rollout, or at least simultaneously.  No one thought it a good idea to deploy smart meters before the MDM was in place.  Some of the group felt that the holy grail of smart metering – interval readings every 15 minutes – is useless for residential applications, although useful in commercial and industrial applications.  One panelist said his utility had activated remote disconnect for only 1% of its smart meters, although that was due to local regulations governing disconnect processes.

Navigant Research’s report, Meter Data Management, published 3Q 2012,  stressed the need for detailed planning before installing an MDM system.  These discussions reminded me how true that is!

Sandia National Laboratories is developing a microgrid architecture that holds the potential to revolutionize not only the microgrid industry, but all electricity generation.  The secure scalable microgrid (SSM) will allow for 100% stochastic, or unpredictable, generation (e.g., solar PV and wind).  Many companies and individuals have feared that renewable generation assets will compromise the stability of the electricity grid, and, under more traditional grid architectures, this makes sense intuitively.  Since neither solar nor wind are load-following or dispatchable, they can wreak havoc in the absence of sufficient traditional generation or energy storage to compensate for the large swings in renewable production.

The SSM architecture includes a communication network that connects the loads to the generation assets, along with weather and load prediction, energy storage assessments, and a device to monitor the connection to the central utility.  It uses Hamiltonian functions to balance and optimize generation and load given uncertainties in the data it collects.  With an open architecture design, the SSM also promotes transparency of operation, configurability, extensibility to different systems, and its “plug-and-play” capability.

SSM is currently being tested at the SSM Test Bed in New Mexico, which includes programmable loads that mimic both fossil and renewable based generation, buses, and integrated control computers to effectively simulate the microgrid in Lanai, Hawaii.  While there is no timeline yet for the commercialization of the technology, its eventual introduction into the market will allow for significantly greater penetration of renewables than are currently feasible.

Enabling the Green Grid

The major implication for SSM is that electricity generation can become completely renewable and independent of fossil fuels, a necessary step in the greening of the power grid.  Environmental concerns aside, completely stochastic electricity production usually requires no fuel inputs.  As the production costs associated with solar PV and wind turbines continue to decrease, and stochastic generation becomes economically competitive with traditional fossil fuel generation, the SSM should allow a transition to mostly, or completely, renewable electricity generation.

New Zealand and Austria, for example, have goals of 90% and 78% renewable generation, respectively, in the coming decades.  While it’s relatively simple, if costly, to install sufficient qualifying generation, the task of ensuring grid stability is much more daunting.  Germany has recently experienced grid issues due to its high penetration of solar, since power outputs can change very rapidly.  The SSM grid architecture, if it can be scaled up for central grid use, would help to ensure that even significant fluctuations in power output from renewable sources can maintain consistent voltage and frequency across the grid.

In the near future, the SSM architecture will bolster the ability of utilities to meet renewable energy requirements by incorporating utility distribution microgrids (UDMs) into their portfolios and service areas.  As described in the Navigant Research report Utility Distribution Microgrids, UDMs are forecast to increase 1,100 MW by 2018, and this trend will only be reinforced by the advent of the SSM.

Total UDM Capacity by Region, Average Scenario, World Markets: 2012-2018

(Source: Navigant Research)

I recently spent three weeks in India, and like most Americans traveling the subcontinent, I was struck by the deep differences between our two societies.  Waste disposal is a highly visible one – in the United States, we like to bury our trash and forget about it.  In India, trash is thrown on the ground and forgotten, or rather, ignored.

One of the sharpest differences between the United States and India, though, is the power system.  Citizens of developed countries are used to 24/7 access to power.  Sure, sometimes that power may be more expensive (thanks to utility attempts to balance demand throughout the day and night).  But when we flip a light switch, we take it for granted that the light will indeed turn on.  What if it didn’t?  What if we had regular power cuts, either scheduled or for emergency purposes?

In India, power cuts are a part of life.  The infrastructure was not built to handle such a huge population and, while construction is rampant throughout India, progress is slow and expensive.  Thus, utilities simply shut off the power when it becomes too difficult or expensive to run.  In Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, power cuts are scheduled for 2 hours a day, staggered across different parts of the city.  In the house where I was staying, the power went off from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily.  In remote villages, access to electricity is the exception: power cuts can last as long as 16 hours, every day.

Geographic Inequality

This may seem backward to those of us used to constantly running air conditioners.  But if American utilities practiced routine load shedding, even for 5 minutes a day, huge amounts of energy could be saved.  This is the principle behind smart appliances, which don’t consume electricity when it’s not needed.  In India, where smart appliances are still essentially unknown, load shedding is an effort to prevent emergency power cuts and blackouts, such as the massive blackout that gripped 20 states in north India last July.  Demand often outstrips supply, especially with inefficiencies and theft common across the Indian power grid, which accounts for between 20% and 50% of all power generated in the country.

Officials tend to blame coal shortages, although it is really a matter of geographic inequality.  India’s grid is fragmented.  Even when there’s a surplus of electricity in one part of the country, it’s impossible to transport it without losing most of the energy along the way.  Clearly, the Indian grid needs revamped massive upgrades.  On the website Powercuts.in, citizens can report electricity outages via mobile web, SMS, Twitter, and other smartphone applications.  This website takes the information and makes it publicly available.  This is only effective in major cities, though, where cell phone reception is reliable and consistent.  The full extent of load shedding is hard to quantify.

In India, one of the most rapidly developing economies in the world, major inefficiencies in the grid cause many people to be without electricity on a daily basis, slowing development and costing billions of rupees in lost productivity, especially in villages.  The situation could be improved by integrating localized renewables, which is already happening, as well as better mapping of electricity use nationwide, which could reduce theft and inefficiencies.

It’s difficult to imagine, as an American, the effects of such widespread blackouts.  But with the growing frequency of major natural disasters and our own grid aging, they may soon become more familiar.