Smart Grid 19

[jghrist]

Fix the problem with turning off your hot water heater, by switching to gas hot water.

And you would also be able to take a hot shower when an ice storm knocks out power to thousands. But then the smart meters will let the power company know that thousands are out of power, so all is well.

I more or less agree with 86ed. A lot of this stuff has been around in one form or another. One difference now is that before, you had to do an economic analysis to justify it. Now, the government throws money at it so you have to do it to get the "free" money. Another is the terminology. I can't quite figure out why, but the term "smart grid" just grates me the wrong way. Before the last few years, we didn't have a "grid" in the USA. We had transmission and distribution systems. Grids are what they had in Europe.

 

[MikeHalloran]

On the one hand, I understand the reasons for increasing the, what is it, utilization factor? I.e., making sure there's very little excess capacity beyond what's needed.

On the other hand, we've already got that in the USA air travel system, which is, um, fragile. One plane blows a tire, and every airport within a thousand miles is jammed up for the rest of the day.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[Skogsgurra]

We (EU) do not have a choice any more. For several years, the law says that utilities shall read meters at least once/month.

So, new meters have been installed throughout. The reasoning behind this is (said to be) threefold: 1. Customer shall be billed more often so that money flows in streams rather than in chunks and 2. If customer sees that his electricity bill has increased one mont, she/he will do something about it so that next month's bill shall be lower (this is supposed to lessen energy usage and save our planet). And, lastly, 3. The new meters are said to be more correct - less measurement errors.

The AMR (automatic meter reading) is done in several ways. Some use PLC (power line communication), some use internet and some use radio communication. Most of these techniques have their problems. PLC, which I have been involved in, is disturbed by interference from VFDs and. In some areas, the utilities have just as many meter readers as before. Reading meters twelve times/year and having lots of systems floored by VFDs is the reason.

Also, very few people actually care. And fewer still try to do something to reduce energy usage. If they do it, it is because they want to save energy and not because they get a bill every month instead of every third month.

There is also a problem with some of the new meters. They give very high readings in certain cases. I had a very interesting job a couple of months ago where I was asked to find the reason why some customers got their electricity bills almost doubled - in some cases even more - when the new meters were introduced. What I found is astonishing. Certain loads make the meters run between five and six times faster (making the bill five to six times bigger) and that is not because of faulty individual meters, but all meters from a certain manufacturer have the same problem.

This is now being handled centrally (national board of energy) and I am very interested in the outcome. It is about hundreds of thousands of meters only in Sweden. And zillions in Europe and the US.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

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100 % recycled posting: Electrons, ideas, finger-tips have been used over and over again...

 

[BigInch]

Skogs,

Very interesting. At my brother-in-law's new apartment, with smart meter, the renter received a bill for 600 Euros for November 2008's consumption. I looked into it and found the outside temperatures were not very low and the air heat was only operated for a few hours the whole month. In short there was no way the meter could have been correct. We had to hire an "approved" electrician to take a reading and send it to them. It took an additional three months of fighting to get Endesa to send their own technician. Fortunately he too agreed that the meter was wrong. The meter was replaced, but none of the 600 Euros was ever refunded, despite repeated requests. Endesa effectively stole what I figured to be around 525 Euros. I wanted to take them to court, but my b-i-l did't want to press it. Now I figure they're both to blame.

Can I ask the nature of the loads giving specific problems?

**********************
"The problem isn't finding the solution, its trying to get to the real question." BigInch

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.live.com/

 

[Skogsgurra]

If you have resistive load with dimmers (incandescent lamps, heaters and such with triac or thyristor control), you will see very large errors. I did tests with many different loads and it was only with dimmed resistive loads that I got errors. It is interesting to note that this kind of load is not specified in the tests that meters undergo. But it is not an uncommon load.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

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100 % recycled posting: Electrons, ideas, finger-tips have been used over and over again...

 

[jghrist]

Gunnar,
Any idea why the errors occur? Do the dimmers cause enough distortion to get multiple zero-crossings?

 

[Skogsgurra]

All I can see is that the failing meters seems to have a problem when conduction angle is less than 180 degrees. They handle all phase shifts and non-linearities well. But not current waveforms that are less than a full half-period.

I am afraid that only a few people at the manufacturer's lab know why this happens. And it is a long way before I get to talk to them - if ever...

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

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100 % recycled posting: Electrons, ideas, finger-tips have been used over and over again...

 

[cranky108]

This wasen't the case when the old meters were designed. We did not have the dimmers.

New meters are a good idea, and in many places they are all the newer type. This also lets many utilities do AMR. And the same technology is in use for gas and water. However these meters can't shut off service.

The idea of prepaid electric was proposed many years ago, but turned down in several states as crual.
What is crual is the rest of us pay for part of the cost of all these turn off's and turn on's.

 

[rmw]

I notice from the website that RBulsara posts that his locality is Connecticut. I don't think there is a lot of air conditioning load in CT. So maybe their peak is as he states. I live in Texas, and we run air conditioners a large part of the year. Our peak is evenings when Mr. and Mrs. Joe Public get home and crank the air and begin to use other appliances.

When I first started working in the power industry over 30 years ago, the daily peak was sometime between 3-5 PM. Now it has shifted to between 5-8 PM. That is pure residential contribution.

What I see the smart grid and smart meters being down the road is a license for the power companies to steal from us by measuring demand and saying if you exceed demand limits during peak periods, you pay big time. So what are you going to do, leave your AC off during the day while at work so that you don't exceed demand during the run up to the peak (or even when you get home and contribute to the peak) and come home to a sweltering house?

I see it as a license to steal. I am hoping that it would work out something like what David Beech has presented and they offer a break on power charges to charge electric vehicles in the wee hours of the morning when they need load to keep units on line and operating at peak efficiency, but I doubt that it will be anything that will be to the average consumer's good.

rmw

 

[rmw]

David, I mispelled your name; I am sorry.

rmw

 

[jghrist]

What I see the smart grid and smart meters being down the road is a license for the power companies to steal from us by measuring demand and saying if you exceed demand limits during peak periods, you pay big time.

Why would charging customers a rate that better reflects actual costs be a "license to steal"? There always have been demand related costs in residential loads, but because of metering costs it was not practical to bill them separately. Demand costs were factored into the energy rates.

 

[Marke]

All I can see is that the failing meters seems to have a problem when conduction angle is less than 180 degrees.

So what happens to current from switchmode power supplies in TV, computer, ecolamps etc?
If the only load running is "electronic" does that fool the meter also?

Mark Empson
L M Photonics Ltd

 

[rasevskii]

Historical note: Smart Grid, if you want to call it that, has been around since the 1930s in Europe, called "Ripple Control" or "Rundsteuerung" in German. It involves audio frequency signals, injected at substation level, using coded pulses to activate tariff switching, street lighting, off-peak heating, water pumping, or boilers, for example.

Using pure electromechnaical receivers with tuned circuit relays, synchronous motor timers with contacts set at particular positions in the cycle time of 30 seconds (in one system), about 25 different commands are available.

Transmitters were HF MG sets injecting pulses via contactors and filters at the HV level, say 10KV or even 110kV. Injected power is from tens of KW to hundreds of KW. Today this is done via thyristor systems and software based technology still compatible with the old equipment previously installed. Frequencies used are from 185Hz to over 1000Hz, depending on the network, and neighboring networks. Adjacent networks have to use differing frequencies to avoid interference.

rasevskii

 

[Skogsgurra]

Mark, that is what I am going to check next. But have to do some travelling first. Will be back with the results in a couple of weeks.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

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100 % recycled posting: Electrons, ideas, finger-tips have been used over and over again...

 

[pwrtran]

It is politician driven as far as I see. Smart Grid has been implemented only as smart meters so that the government founds (tax payers money) as quickly allocated and sent. I have seen our IT guys installed more severs and storage but raw data is still raw data, flooded. There is a huge difference between data and information, without data analyzing processing, raw data has no value to utility but chunk of equipment added. We had a AC failure recently in the server room, IT guys can cook eggs on top of their server!

Regulators speak smartly "they do not want spend pennies today to build more power plants just to meet the peak demand (caused by industrial and commercial customers)". So, smart meters implementation seems to be a good way to smooth out the demand profile. Okay, 37% of demand is contributed by residential customers, so what? Most residential customers are already in a position to consume their kWh at off-peak hours. There is no more room for them to squeeze. One presentation at a annual utility conference showed their "penny saving" by implementing the smart meter - if the home owners strictly follow the guideline to use electricity smartly, i.e. do your laundry at mid night, cook dinner after 730pm, tweak up your thermostat for cooling and do the opposite way for heating, guess what "the annual electricity saving for a 3bdrm household is about 26 bucks", and the presenter added his comment - most family paid more.

One of the advantage is Smart Meters can allow utility to disconnect without facing the end users, give me a break! Polices are not for good guys!

Electricity demand will grow anyways as more equipment and more automation in industries, more shopping malls and stores around, more home electronics..., say you don't build power plant today, given the fact the regulators know the load forecast, how about 20 years after. Will it be cheaper to build a power plant by then?

Power industry has no revaluation for more than hundred years. Smart grid will not change the status either.

 

[fsck]

"And their point about needing a smart grid for switching solar panels to grid when there's a peak doesn't seem to make sense either. Why not just charge batteries, feed to grid during peak hours, or shut off at night. "

Interestingly, PGE will not allow any grid-tie system with battery storage. I don't quite know why. The G-T inverters all shut down when isolated ("anti-islanding") anyhow.

It makes zero sense for a homeowner to invest in battery plant for sell-back; but many do want batteries for grid-replacement when Montgomery Burn's Springfield Nuclear Power Plant takes a dive.

BTW: There is one other thing smart meters MIGHT offer a utility, if so designed. It would allow them to stagger the restarting load of recovering from a blackout.

 

[LionelHutz]

If you have ever looked at the regulators or the electricity trading house above the utilities you'd probably find the real cents/kWh can be all over the place. In my area, there was an odd 2x cost peak last night around 8pm and this morning the cost peaked at over 2x around 3am, being high from 1-4am. This instantaneous hydro rate is about as predictable as the stock market and peaks can occur at any time, not just during high demand periods.

Picking arbitrary times to charge for higher rates doesn't consumer sense if the utility doesn't see that higher rate on their front end. Telling consumers to pay for the actual rate won't fix any demand issues, since the actual rate varies constantly and peaks costs change day to day.

Besides, I could never quite figure out how the presently touted smart metering scheme would completely fix demand problems. Say the utility charges a higher rate until 7pm. I'd think this would just lead to a lot of residential customers begin to wait to turn their ovens on until about 7:05pm, or timing their hot water heater until just after 7pm, or waiting on laundry until just after 7pm. So the utility change to 8pm and the same thing happens but some people give up waiting. Change again to 9pm and then everyone gives up waiting and instead just pays the higher cost to cook and do laundry at a normal time.

 

[cranky108]

Has anyone consitered that much of the smart grid stuff is just a marketing scheme to get utility executives to fund marginal projects.

Sort of like the drug comercials on TV.

 

[BigInch]

Yes. That's why I initiated this thread; to see if any distribution engineers could say anything in its favor. So far, not much and still nothing that can't be done right now without it. It apparently only helps billing, but I'm sure more than that must be on the way. I just don't know what ugly monster will raise its head.

**********************
"The problem isn't finding the solution, its trying to get to the real question." BigInch

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.live.com/

 

[ewh]

No one has mentioned the other side of the coin... smart appliances.

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]