Wireless will be used to make electrical grid smart: Effort starts with smart meters, but moves quickly up the grid

Wireless technology will be used to help utility grids become smarter as the technology can help better manage in the delivery of electricity in real time in a more efficient manner. But how great a role wireless plays in the evolving smart grid has yet to be determined.
Austin, Texas, is taking part in one of the more advanced smart-grid projects in the United States. Dr. Michael Webber, a professor with the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the leaders behind the city’s Pecan Street Project, a multi-institutional initiative designed to reinvent that city’s energy delivery system. Webber also is Associate Director, Center for International Energy & Environmental Policy, and Co-Director, Clean Energy Incubator.
“There is no smart grid system today. We’ve got a dumb grid system,” Webber said, explaining that energy moves through the electrical grid based on estimates and projections. Of course, rarely are estimates or projections 100% accurate, so electricity is wasted in that too much is delivered or in the case of too little energy being delivered, brown outs can occur.
The Pecan Street Project’s plan is “to design and implement an energy generation and management system that generates a power plant’s worth of power from clean sources within the city limits and delivers it over an advanced delivery system that allows for unprecedented customer energy management and conservation,” according to the project’s mission statement. Wireless services are part of that effort because the technology can deliver the intelligence to the grid.
The smart grid system is something that will take decades to achieve, but real progress is under way. In order for this vision to develop, billing systems and other items that touch the grid will need to be implemented. Webber imagines a system where devices, some wireless, can monitor electrical use every four seconds at a house instead of once month.
Today, however, most wireless efforts revolve around smart meter reading. But even there, today’s technology is just the tip of the iceberg. Utilities Telecom Council President and CEO Bill Moroney notes that San Diego Gas and Electric found that if 80% of its customers used their washers and drivers at off-peak times, it could eliminate two power plants. Wireless technology that could monitor appliances could use energy more efficiently and eliminate waste.
Telemetry programs could monitor a water heater, sending signals to shut off the power when no one is home and start it up again when people need hot water, Webber noted. “It starts with smart meter-reading efforts that incorporate wireless, but ultimately it will involve more than two data points (the meter and the utility). We need to incorporate the Internet into the smart grid.”
Indeed a groundswell of activity has taken place around telemetry and automation, said Sprint Nextel Corp.’s Bob Gustin, who is the national program manager for utilities. WiMAX technology is increasingly studied as one option for connecting some areas of the smart grid system.
Adding real-time information and communications to the electrical grid will enable a variety of applications that can make the grid smarter, said Harish Belur, Director of Product Management, for Cisco Systems Inc.’s Smart Grid business unit. Cisco envisions an end-to-end communications platform to solve some of these challenges, and believes that a variety of delivery mechanisms, whether wireless or DSL and fiber to the home, will be used. A consistent set of standards needs to be put in place for things like meter reading and at other areas of the network to help advance the industry, Belur said.
Network security is another overwhelming issue and one area where the wireless industry may disagree with the utilities industry on the best direction. UTC’s Moroney said the utilities industry would prefer to have its own dedicated spectrum to monitor smart grid systems. Communications in the electrical grid need to be as secure as the nation’s military communications networks because an attack on the grid could have devastating effects beyond a simple power outage. Canada is looking at a similar initiative, using dedicated spectrum at 1.8 GHz. Moroney said it would be nice if U.S. utilities could use the same spectrum to harmonize with their counterparts to the north. “Utilities have no dedicated spectrum. We share with pizza delivery businesses and taxi cabs.”
Adding communications to the electrical grid also requires a resiliency because people in the United States are used to having electricity available to them at all times and in all manners, Moroney noted.
And while these efforts could take decades to implement, the low-hanging fruit of smart meter-reading and other telemetry applications show the interest in the space.