Comverge Gets Another Smart Meter Management Deal

By Jeff St. John

Comverge (COMV) has landed another deal that calls for it to turn down homes' energy use during peak demand times with pagers at first, and with smart meters later on.The deal is with Dominion Virginia Power (D), and calls for Comverge to manage about 117 megawatts of commercial and industrial power loads.

Comverge will also provide its Apollo software platform to manage demand response devices for about 150,000 homes – representing roughly 150 megawatts of power use – which the utility wants to hook up with smart meters eventually.

The idea is to turn down home air conditioners, water heaters and pool pumps – the devices Comverge can now control – using its existing mainly pager-based communication system at first, said Mike Picchi, Comverge's interim president and CEO.

Then, as Dominion rolls out its smart meters, made by German manufacturer Elster, Comverge will switch over to using them as the gateway into the home instead, Picchi said. Comverge's Apollo software can manage both means of control, he said (see Green Light post).

• The East Hanover, N.J.-based demand response provider has a similar contract with Pepco Holdings Inc., which plans to give its 1.9 million customers General Electric smart meters enabled with Silver Spring Networks communications gear over the next four years.
  
• Comverge also is working with smart meter maker Itron to link its smart meters to Comverge's set of ZigBee-enabled thermostats and other systems. In Texas, it's working on integrating its systems with smart meters from Landis+Gyr, Picchi said.
  
• After all, while every utility installing smart meters says they'll eventually be able to turn down home energy use, none have done so in a full-scale commercial deployment, he said (see The Elusive Smart Meter-Demand Response Combo).
  
• That gives utilities like Pepco and Dominion a short-term choice, he said - wait for smart meters to be in place to start controlling home energy use, or turn to Comverge's existing set of programs, which range from turnkey systems that utilities can control to those managed by Comverge itself.
  
• Comverge mainly controls power in commercial and industrial facilities, a market it shares with demand response competitors such as EnerNoc Inc. (ENOC), CPower, EnergyConnect and Constellation NewEnergy (see Green Light post).

The idea is to turn down energy use when utilities are facing peak demand, saving the cost of building and buying power from "peaker" plants that may need to run only a few hundred hours every year.
But Comverge distinguishes itself from those competitors in that about a quarter of its more than 3,000 megawatts under management come from homes.

Other residential demand response programs exist out there, but most are managed directly by utilities, though Cooper Power Systems does residential demand response work as well.

Big facilities and offices are easier to manage when it comes to demand response – they're bigger targets, and they tend to have staff, and some form of building control system, already in place to carry out the task.

Whether or not millions of homes can be as efficiently networked and controlled for peak demand reduction is a big question in the demand response field (see Demand Response: The Home vs. C&I Debate).

The Electric Power Research Institute predicted in January that the residential, commercial and industrial sectors would roughly share the market for demand response over the coming decades. But expanding the residential share of the pie will require a whole new host of technologies – and business models and regulatory structures – to get there.

One uncertainty is how to get the homeowner involved. Most of Comverge's existing residential demand response programs involve homeowners that sign up for cheaper power in exchange for giving the utility the power to adjust their thermostats for them.

But such direct load control could well give way to using the millions of smart meters being deployed across the United States to offer homeowners a wider variety of options (see 8.3M Smart Meters and Counting in U.S.)

In particular, direct utility control is being downplayed by many of the companies looking to the next generation of smart meters to enable their home energy management offerings (see The Smart Home, Part I).

The idea is that giving customers some kind of control – even if it's only control over choosing settings that automatically turn down stuff via utility commands anyway – is likely to be more popular with utility customers, as well as the regulatory bodies that tell utilities how they can spend their money.

Simply giving customers a view into their energy use can yield big savings, according to many pilot trials of in-home energy devices (see Smart Grid: Test Customers Give Thumbs Up).

And the host of companies looking to make such in-home energy display systems is expanding rapidly, with dozens of startups such as Tendril Networks, EnergyHub, Energate, Control4, Greenbox Technology, Onzo, AlertMe, eMeter and OpenPeak all competing with each other, as well as new home energy systems from Google, Microsoft and Cisco, for utilities' favor (see stories here, here and here).

Some of those systems extend beyond providing information to actual control over home energy suckers, using digital thermostats or "smart plugs" that turn power on and off at the wall socket. Those can be controlled with or without utility involvement, though analysts predict it will take subsidies from utilities – or perhaps a move by telecommunications companies to add them on to existing home entertainment and security systems – to make them more widely popular (see The Telco Home Energy Invasion).

Using smart meters to send pricing signals that encourage people to cut down on using power when its most expensive could be one way to do that. Many utilities are testing such pricing schemes in pilot projects. Some, such as Arizona utilities Salt River Project and Arizona Public Service and a host of utilities in Canada's Ontario province, such as Milton Hydro, are trying them out in a more widespread fashion.

In the meantime, General Electric and Whirlpool are planning to make smart appliances that can power down in response to utility or homeowner controls, though how fast those could come to market will depend on how quickly utilities settle on a standard set of technologies (see GE's Smart Appliances: Smarter With GE Home Energy Manager).

The question of standards and technologies, in turn, is likely to be guided by emerging guidelines for the $3.9 billion in federal stimulus grants directed at smart grid projects, including smart meter deployments (see DOE Hands Out $47M for Smart Grid Demos).

The Rest @ Seeking Alpha

SmartMeters to Grow by 400% in Two Years

The number of smart electricity meters with two-way communications is poised to mushroom in the next two years, according to a study.

Research company Park Associates this week released figures for smart-meter installations in the U.S., saying that there are 8 million units installed, or about 6 percent of all meters.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

As utilities upgrade equipment as part of smart-grid trials, the number of smart meters is forecast to grow to 13.6 million installed next year and to over 33 million in 2011.

Having a method to broker regular communications between a utility and a customer will set the foundation for a widening array of home-energy management tools, said Bill Ablondi, Park Associates' director of home systems.

Home energy management systems can be relatively simple displays or Web-based programs that show how much electricity a home is using. More high-end systems can be built around home-area networks where consumers can program smart appliances and lighting to cut power consumption.

The enabling technology for the more sophisticated home-energy management systems includes various wireless communications options for within the home and for smart meters. But even though many of the technology components are now available, there are a number of barriers to widespread adoption of the smart grid, even with billions of stimulus dollars targeted for smart-grid programs.

Upgrading the electricity distribution system is expensive and variable pricing structures that reflect the cost of peak-time electricity could take a long time to be implemented, Ablondi said in a recent presentation. Also, consumer interest in managing energy, which is high right now, could wane, he added.

Previous smart-grid coverage

FAQ: What the smart grid means to youThere are many definitions and technologies under the smart grid banner. What's the goal and why all the attention?

Images: The many faces of the smart grid - CNET NewsThere are many technologies that go into making the smart grid, a grid that is more efficient and reliable as a whole.

Are consumers ready for the smart grid?Smart meters and in-home energy displays are trickling out into people's homes. But there's still some question whether the technology is consumer-friendly enough.

GE: Smart grid yields net-zero energy home At its research labs, GE says it has the smart-grid technology, including solar panels and efficient appliances, to build a home that has a net-zero energy consumption.

Photos: GE's smart-grid kitchen of the futureAt its research labs, GE shows off demand-response appliances that can take advantage of cheaper electricity rates automatically.

Control4 adds energy monitoring to home networkBest known for its home entertainment controllers, Control4 gets funds to expand into smart-grid products to monitor and control home energy use.

GE appliances to connect to smart grid via TendrilSmart-grid start-up Tendril Networks and GE will test a system in which home appliances share data with utilities to cut electricity consumption.

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.

The Rest @ CNET

Smart Grid Funding Opportunity Announcement by DOE

DOE issued solicitations in late June for $3.9 billion in grants to support the development and demonstration of smart grid technologies. Smart grid technologies involve adding communication capabilities and control systems to the electrical grid. Just as the Internet drastically changed how people use their home computers, adding communications to the power grid is expected to change how people use electricity, resulting in improved home energy management for the homeowner, greater demand control for the utility, and a more reliable power grid overall. Smart grids are also expected to better accommodate the use of renewable energy, all forms of on-site power production, and electric vehicles.

DOE's new solicitations include a $3.3 billion Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program, which is intended to enable smart grid functions on the nation's electrical grid as soon as possible.

• The cost-shared grants will support the manufacturing, purchasing, and installation of existing smart grid technologies that can be deployed on a commercial scale, with a maximum award of $200 million.

Applications are due on August 6. DOE also issued an FOA for $615 million to identify and develop new and more effective smart grid technologies.

The Smart Grid Demonstration Program will support demonstrations of the innovative use of emerging technologies in the power grid, with a maximum award of $100 million.

Applications are due on August 26.

Both solicitations are funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

See the DOE press release, and download the FOAs by searching the public opportunities on FedConnect for reference numbers DE-FOA-0000058 for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program and DE-FOA-0000036 for the Smart Grid Demonstrations Program.

As DOE works to help deploy the smart grid, the U.S. Commerce Department is working to develop the technical standards that will govern its construction.

Just as most home entertainment systems involve combining components from different manufacturers that need to work together, a smart grid will require smart electric meters, smart home appliances, and utility systems to work together.

• The system must allow for upgrades to handle electric vehicles and new power sources, but like the Internet, it must also be secure against outside tampering.
• Standards will also aim to avoid utility investments in technologies that may quickly become outmoded.

As the first step to creating smart grid standards, the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a 300-page report, prepared by the Electric Power Research Institute, to identify the issues and priorities for developing such standards. NIST released the report in mid-June and opened it to public comment with a Federal Register notice on June 30.

• Comments are due by July 30. See the NIST press release, the Federal Register notice, and the full 291-page report (PDF 5.7 MB). Download Adobe Reader.
  Printable Version

The Rest @ The Deprtment of Energy

IBM's Energy and Utilities Group

IBM's energy and utilities group Is developing Multi-Micro Grid management Software.




To make that possible, IBM is focusing on smart-grid software to manage the complexities of a system that might have 2,000 variable power inputs over 100 square miles, instead of two power plants. It's also developing cheaper photovoltaics (prices are already projected to fall by 20% to 30% this year), and Shepler has been working with the federal government to write recommendations for incentives and R&D investments.

Allan Schurr, the VP of strategy and development at IBM's energy and utilities group, says simply, "Distributed energy is happening."

The Rest @ Fast Company

Fast Co Explores Micro Grids

Why small-scale, local power -- the microgrid -- could be the answer to our energy crisis. And why the big utilities are fighting it with all they've got.

Infographic: The Microgrid Dream House

In April 2007, a helicopter landed in a backyard in Johnson Valley, California, a desert hamlet of 440 residents on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. "One of the neighbors went out and asked them what they were doing just a few hundred feet from his house," Jim Harvey, a local landowner, recalls.

"They said, 'We're the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and congratulations! You're the lucky lottery winners of a brand new power line that's going to come right through the middle of your town.' "

That power line is called Green Path North -- an 85-mile-long high-voltage transmission wire from Los Angeles through public and private lands, connecting the city to potential geothermal and solar-thermal resources, with the whole shebang to be owned by the LADWP and paid for over the next decade by ratepayers. The cost: up to $1 billion just for the transmission line, plus untold billions for the not-yet-planned power plants themselves.

• Some 2,000 acres of desert would be sacrificed for a project that would, if it ever gets built, carry about 800 megawatts of renewable electricity -- enough for 600,000 homes.
  

Green Path North is pretty typical of the renewables push in the United States: big, expensive, slow, and spectacularly uncertain.

• Twenty-eight states have pledged to shift their energy mix to at least 10% renewables, and at press time, Congress was considering a national target of 15% by 2020. But if many of us see this moment as a defining one, a key opportunity to reassess how we create and use energy across the country, the federal government seems content to leave the owners of the old energy world in charge of designing the new one.
• Big utilities are pushing hard to do what they do best -- getting the government to subsidize construction of multi-billion-dollar, far-flung, supersize solar and wind farms covering millions of acres, all connected via outsize transmission lines. Nevada senator Harry Reid has introduced legislation to speed the way for a national "electric superhighway." (Former Vice President Al Gore is another champion.)

"We need to have an efficient way to take energy created in often remote areas and move it to where it is needed," Reid said this spring on the Senate floor. "A cleaner, greener national transmission system -- an electric superhighway -- must be a top national priority."

• But the men appear to be victims of a bad metaphor. There's nothing especially efficient or high tech about heavy-duty aluminum-steel cables; "line loss" -- the power lost during transmission -- runs as high as 10% on our overloaded grid.

The power lines take years to propose, approve, and complete; Green Path North alone has gone through seven potential routes since 2006. And the LADWP is taking a flyer that the remote, large geothermal and solar power plants it's supposed to connect with will even be built.

In all, the federal Bureau of Land Management has to date received almost 400 applications for large solar and wind plants covering 2.3 million rural acres. Only a few of those have undergone environmental assessments -- and that's only the first step in a multiyear planning, permitting, and building process.

Meanwhile, utilities are making plenty of money off their existing investments in fossil-fuel power. It often seems that according to utilities, renewables are the power resource of the next decade, and always will be.

Harvey says he has a better idea. The founder of the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, he's no NIMBY complainer. "We're just the opposite; we want it in our backyard," he says. "

• We want to put solar panels on our roofs and our neighbors' roofs." The nearby city of Palm Desert rolled out a program last August funding fixed-rate loans to private homeowners for rooftop solar, and within weeks, the money had been spent and panels were up on roofs. "The choice is clear," says Harvey. "If you want renewables, you want 'em clean and you want 'em fast, and the best way to do that is [rooftops]. But the utilities have been so adamant about thwarting these programs. They are the ones that are standing in our way."

[Finally, the bottom line Follows]

The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100% green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone.

• Companies like GE and IBM are talking in terms of up to half of American homes generating their own electricity, renewably, within a decade. But distributed power -- call it the "microgrid" -- poses an existential threat to the business model the utilities have happily depended on for more than a century.
• No wonder so many of them are fighting the microgrid every step of the way.

Why small-scale, local power -- the microgrid -- could be the answer to our energy crisis. And why the big utilities are fighting it with all they've got.

Companies like GE and IBM are talking about up to half of American homes generating their own electricity, renewably, within a decade.

Theoretically, the microgrid is simple.

• Imagine you could go to Home Depot and pick out a wind or solar appliance that's as easy to install as a washer/dryer. It makes all the electricity your home needs and pays for itself in just a few years. Your home still connects to the existing wires and power plants, but it is a two-way connection: You're just as likely to be uploading power to the grid as downloading from it.
• Your power supply communicates with the rest of the system via a two-way digital smart meter, and you can view your energy use and generation in real time on your iPhone. Maybe you also have an electric car in the garage; the battery serves as backup storage for your house as well. And the best part: Assuming you produce more than you draw, instead of a monthly bill, you get a check.

A half-block from City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sits an unofficial prototype of this microgrid model. In 1983, when Sue Butler first bought her home, it was a condemned burned-out shell where police sent vagrants to crash. Today, the historic Italianate house built in 1858 has a comfortable artsy grace that matches the owner's; a cello and violin wait for a duet among a jungle of plants by the bay window.

An elderly dog wheezes in the kitchen. On the roof, powering this cozy scene, sits a half-kilowatt microwind turbine and 5.5 kilowatts' worth of solar panels. The system was roughly half paid for by a $25,000 grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which administers a fund collected from a surcharge on every electric bill in the state.

The solar installation can produce two to three times as much energy as Butler's home needs, meaning she can run her meter backward and sell a surplus back to the grid, a procedure called "net metering."

Sue Butler's house can generate juice for two others. Put one on every block and soon you have a renewable-power plant.

A neat addition to Butler's system is the standard commercial meter that she finagled from NSTAR, the local utility.

Unlike flat-rate residential electric meters, commercial meters show the price of power varying with usage over the course of the day. Butler can bank power in the batteries in her basement -- they hold enough to run her house for a week -- and sell it back to the grid at times of peak use.

"It's a low-tech smart grid," says Jonah DeCola, the soft-spoken self-taught engineer and union carpenter who put together her system as proof of concept. DeCola is building a career cobbling together systems like this and teaching community college kids, new immigrants, and ex-cons the trade as well.

He calculates the payback on Butler's $60,000 system at four-and-a-half years or less. "She's getting premium for her juice," he says.

Now think about this.

• Each Sue Butler can potentially power three homes.
• Put one of these on every block, and eventually you have a renewable-power plant right in the middle of an urban downtown.
• The developers of an office park or a mall can easily install 10 times as much solar power; and a town can do even more, like the town of Hull, on Boston Harbor, which currently has two community-owned wind turbines totaling more than 2 megawatts and is planning four more to power the entire town.

You may have heard a lot already about how companies such as Cisco, Google, GE, and IBM are investing billions in the so-called smart grid, the software and the digital appliances that will let consumers and power producers make intelligent, efficient decisions about their electric-power use.

Well, the killer app comes when you, the consumer, can actually profit by using power intelligently.

What we're talking about here is potentially a shift every bit as profound as the switch from mainframes to PCs, or from landlines to cellular -- a movement from behemoth centralized power plants to a network of privately owned, renewable, geographically distributed installations, managed using the same kind of packet-switching software that regulates the flow of information over the Internet.

The microgrid is all about consumer control -- aligning monetary incentives, with the help of information technology, to make renewables and efficiency pay off for the average homeowner, commercial developer, or even a town. The name of the game is to scale up renewables big enough, fast enough, to bring the cost down to parity with conventional resources.

The Rest @ Fast Company

The Smart Grid to Cost $400 Billion

When the intelligent grid gets built, will anyone notice?" Don Von Dollen, EPRI's IntelliGrid program manager, is only partly joking when he asks this question. Of course utilities will notice the benefits that come from greater intelligence in the power-distribution network--better diagnostics, & The Smart Grid
Provides Smart Grid Technologies Reliability Efficiency Utilization

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At the same time, however, these advancements generally are occurring in small steps rather than giant leaps.

Very few utilities will flip a switch and wake up the intelligent grid, like a mundane version of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. That's because grid intelligence does not emerge from a single rollout of revolutionary technology, but from strategic planning and targeted investments--a substation here, a metering project there--all aimed at a long-term vision.

"The book value of U.S. T&D assets is something like $400 billion," Von Dollen observes. "That huge investment will not be transformed, but will evolve through incremental investments that knit together this new intelligent infrastructure, with communications networks and embedded processing."

The Rest @ All Business
And there's the rub for the intelligent grid.