DistribuTECH 2013

I spent the last week in January at DistribuTECH 2013 in San Diego.  There were nearly 10,000 attendees at the annual conference and exhibition that focuses on the technologies being applied to distribution systems, but it also includes other areas such as transmission, water utilities, and power products.   If you haven’t been, I would recommend you check it out next year (www.distributech.com).   It is very well run, and includes a large exhibit hall, conference sessions, and educational courses.   And the networking opportunities are outstanding.

I think it’s notable that we are now starting to see more reports of the Smart Grid projects that were partially funded with ARRA stimulus funds back in 2009 – 2010.  This was true for quite a few of the presentations at DistribuTECH.  It’s important for the industry that the benefits and lessons learned from these projects are communicated and discussed at length.

In the last year, some news media have reported isolated cases of dissatisfaction and concerns over AMI and smart grid.  Often, AMI is associated one-to-one with smart grid in people’s minds, even though there are many aspects of smart grid that are not AMI-related.  it is important that an unemotional, fact-based presentation and discussion of the results of projects be performed.  The education of all the stakeholders, of the costs and benefits of smart grid projects, will enable an open evaluation of the investments that are made in smart grid.

Solid business cases are even more important, given the tough economic times that we are still experiencing.   Electricity growth in the US has been negative three of the last four years.  If the revenue of power delivery organizations is similarly reduced, one can bet that more scrutiny will be placed on investments of any kind.   The application of many smart grid technologies is still relatively new, making it even more important that a continuous education effort take place.

Regulators are still supporting smart grid initiatives.  In November 2012, NARUC (National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners) passed “EL-2/ERE-3 Resolution Supporting the Rapid Deployment of Voltage Optimization Technologies”,   The resolution “…encourages State public service commissions to evaluate the energy efficiency and demand reduction opportunities that can be achieved with the deployment of Volt-Var Optimization (VVO) technologies and other electric utility grid modernization technologies and activities, and use of appropriate measurement and verification tools to ensure that such technologies provide the projected savings.”  Volt-Var Optimization has a very strong business case, and it appears that this message has been increasingly communicated in the industry.

Now it is up to everyone working on Smart Grid projects to continue to communicate the benefits of projects that have been undertaken.   Industry forums like DistribuTECH give everyone the opportunity to participate in detailed discussions along those lines.

Electricity Growth Slows In US

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that electricity growth will average 0.7% per year through 2040.

If this winds up to be true, this will be quite an historic long-range trend for the electric industry.  Historically, electricity growth in a country had strong correlation with economic growth, typically measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  In the 1950’s and 1960’s, while the US economy experienced high growth, it wasn’t uncommon to electricity usage increases of 6 – 8%.

Such days of high growth may not be seen again in the next thirty years, if the EIA is correct.  In fact, in 3 out of the last 4 years, electricity growth was negative.  The poor economy certainly had a major influence on this.

But there are other longer-term drivers behind this trend.  The investments that have been in the energy efficiency sector, but public and private, are having a real impact.  Everything from more efficient appliance standards, to increasing penetration of technologies such as adjustable speed drives and compact fluorescent lighting (with more efficient LED’s on the way), to building automation and control systems are reducing electricity’s growth rate.  Also, the decrease in the nation’s manufacturing base continues to reduce electricity growth.  This was felt as early as the 80’s and 90’s in locations like the Midwest, and its reach has continued to other areas of the country.

The impact on the electric distribution industry can be substantial.  Smaller increases in electricity usage means smaller top-line revenue for distribution  organizations.  As with all other organizations, if new sources of revenue compensate for the slow growth, then organization’s management looks to make the cost base consistent with the revenue base.  Cost-cutting and productivity measures become important in these environments.

No doubt, there are other reasons why a distribution organizations cost basis may grow in such in an environment.  Two of the largest are the need to re-invest in system infrastructure, as the system ages and reliability needs to be maintained, and de-coupling ratemaking mechanisms, which can provide distribution organizations a financial incentive for reducing electricity usage.

Despite these mitigating factors, for some distribution organizations in the US, we can expect to see:

·         Reduced capital expenditures and operating expenditures

·         Productivity initiatives throughout an organization, leveraging growing organizational technologies such as consolidation of IT and OT systems, mobile solutions, and analytics projects

·         Distribution system efficiency improvements, such as volt/VAR optimization

Electric Service Continuity in Major Events

With the latest super storm hitting the Northeast  in October, the discussions began anew on how electric distribution systems can be made robust to withstand storms.  At its core, this type of event is not new – it’s been repeated time and time again, since the first distribution systems went into service in the 18880’s.  Is there anything new to discuss?

One topic that always receives more discussion after major events is undergrounding the system.  One does not have to look far to see many studies and analyses that have been done, showing the high expense in undergrounding distribution facilities en masse.  Undergrounding isn’t without its faults as well – higher O&M costs, its susceptibility to events such as flooding, and longer restoration times in some cases all have to be considered.  Underground entire systems just isn’t practical.

Another topic that is now frequently discussed in whether smart grid investments should be increased to help withstand storms.  Depending on what you call “smart grid”, many of these investments help in system restoration efforts, not as much as in enhancing the robustness of the system.  This particularly includes distribution automation, whose effectiveness, it can be argued, isn’t as nearly as strong when the large amounts of system damage de-energize widespread areas.  Other “smart grid” investments, particularly the IT systems that are used in outage restoration – the outage management system (OMS), mobile workforce management, GIS, distribution operations analytics, and customer communications tools -  improve situational awareness and provide tools for improved coordination of restoration resources, reducing restoration times.

Personally, I think changes in the discussion on service continuity has to flow from the policy and regulatory level.  First, a more comprehensive effort has to be done to look at the value of electric service during major events.  The value of electric service is different for different end users, and it has to be treated as such.  Distribution companies have taken this into account for years – service continuity is more important for critical customers such as hospitals, nursing homes, police and fire stations, and water pumping stations.  Other loads aren’t as critical.  One question to be considered is whether our way of living, and society’s values, have increased the value of electric service to other loads.   Namely, the importance of loads such as gas stations and cell-phone charging were evident when watching the video coming from New England after Hurricane Sandy.  These are just examples – the question is, for what specific loads has the value of service continuity changed, and in particular, increased due to changes in our world?

Second, in line with revisiting the value of service continuity to particular loads, the economic costs of increasing the reliability to those loads needs to be considered. Undergrounding may be a part of this solution, but we are not talking about undergrounding large parts of the system, or the whole system, as many studies have analyzed.  Instead, a focused analysis on the costs of different alternatives for maintaining service continuity to different loads is called for.  Alternatives could be hardened overhead lines, undergrounding in selected locations, mobile generation, and many more, some enabled by new technologies.

Outage Response and Storm Restoration Conference

This month I attended the 12^th Annual Marcus Evans Outage Response and Restoration Management conference in Atlanta, GA.   It was an excellent forum, with 160 attendees focused on finding better ways to prevent and respond to electric system outages.

Typical for this conference, there were engaging and very useful presentations on events that the speakers had worked through:  hurricanes and tropical storms, blizzards, floods, and wild fires.  At times, the presentations turned personal, and the emotional impact on the audience was almost palpable. The speakers had been through the events, and they shared stories, photographs, and videos of the tremendous impact of the events on the people and their communities. 

Certainly there was a lot of sharing of best practices, in terms of continuous storm planning, immediate event preparation, activities during the storm, and post-event restoration. 

It’s particularly interesting to see how technology advancements get adapted for storm preparation and response.  This includes:

Weather forecasts and damage prediction – The sophistication of weather forecasting has grown over the last thirty years, particularly with the advances in computer modeling of meteorology.    More efforts are being made, including my company, to take the weather forecasts and predict the amounts and types of damage that will occur, based on weather forecasts and past records of damage with similar storms.  This feeds directly into forecasts of required resources, materials, and the Estimated Times to Restore, which are so important to customers.

GPS/AVL for tracking resources – GPS and Automatic Vehicle Location, while not new, continues to gain acceptance as a more effective way to track resources over a wide area.

E-mailing of work packages – This is an interesting one, in the sense that it is relatively simple, from a technology standpoint, but saves so much time and effort during storm restoration.   Typically, in a paper-based system, work package materials such as work orders and circuit maps were printed out, assembled, and then driven over in large stacks to the staging area to be given out to the work crews.  This typically would take hours.  With electronic documents and e-mail, if the crews have a mobile device with an e-mail address, the work packages can be e-mailed to them directly, saving time and resources.

Mobility packages, given out to mutual aid crews and contractors - Some utilities assemble mobility packages, which might consist of a laptop computer, GPS,  and other materials in something like a Rubbermaid bin.  This provides the mutual aid crews and contractors with tools to access the utilities’ IT infrastructure. 

But the topic that received the most amount of new discussion was the use of social media in storm events.  Utilities described how they are increasingly devoting more resources to the use of applications such as Facebook and Twitter, as more and more people use them with regularity.  And because of the strong linkage between social media and mobile technologies like smart phones, it means everyone gains an improved awareness of conditions, even during the storm, that is almost instantaneous, distributed throughout a service territory, and not dependent upon having power from the grid (at least until the batteries are discharged in the mobile devices.)   Utilities are already using these tools to collect outage reports, gather photos of damage from customers and employees, and communicate pictures of system damage and restoration efforts to a wide audience.  Challenges remain:  how to separate fact from fiction on the social networks, how to manage “trolls” that want to use social media to make destructive and unhelpful positions on every topic imaginable, and how to make use of all the unstructured data and knowledge that is coming from the social network.   But that will be the subject of much future development, and the topic of a future blog.

Information Technology Trends

InformationWeek published results from its annual survey of 500 executives in its September 17 edition.   In an article titled  “The IT Rules Have Changed”, the first sentence was “Mobile devices, cloud computing, and big data analytics are blowing the old IT rules to pieces.”   So are these trends also prevalent in distribution operations?  In my view,  2 of 3 are top trends in distribution operations.

In distribution operations, I think we’re just starting to see an acceleration in mobile capabilities.   While many organizations have been using mobile systems for tasks such as service orders and outages, and to view maps in some cases, I believe that we are going to see many more types of information flowing both to and from the field.  This includes data related to infrastructure condition and system operations.  And we’re just staring to see applications of social media technologies, which go hand-in-hand with mobile, in distribution operations. 

Cloud computing for distribution operations still doesn’t have wide application in distribution operations yet.  While other parts of the electric utility are using the cloud more often, there are obstacles to overcome in distribution operations – namely, with respect to the high system performance requirements, system reliability, and evolving security measures in distribution operations.  The many interfaces that typical distribution operations systems have, including GIS, CIS, IVR,  and AMI/MDM, may also make it tougher for cloud computing.  Certainly there is a trend, however, in increased use of server virtualization in distribution operations.

Big data analytics is just starting.  In my view, this may be next big thing (or buzz word, if you prefer) in the industry,;  we had  re-engineering, de-regulation, asset management, smart grid, and now big data.   Successful development and application of analytics poses a particular challenge for the industry, since many analytics will require successful teamwork among those with expertise in mathematics/statistics, IT, and distribution equipment/ operations domain expertise.

So are there areas in distribution operations that weren’t covered are these big three?  I believe system integration technologies, coupled with data modeling, will continue to see a very high level of development.  System security will also continue to receive a high amount of attention, as  security regulations continue to evolve, and technologies change with it. 

More Perspectives on Distributed Generation

Back in February of this year, I wrote about an analysis that I had done on the long-term forecast for different types of generation in the US.  I used the most recent data that was available from the US Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook.  Using their forecast of electric generation over the next 25 years, some of my findings were:

1.       The continued impact that natural gas will have on our energy supply is forecast to be very significant.  Of the 196 GW of new generation to be built, it is forecast that natural gas will account for 119 GW (61%).  

2.       Large generation technologies that utilize economies of scale are still dominant.   This is evident by the amount of centralized generation to be added (86%) versus the amount of distributed generation (14%).

3.       If only 14% of new capacity additions will be on the distribution system, does this mean you don’t have to worry about distributed generation on your distribution system? It depends.  Regional policies such as renewable portfolio standards, tax incentives, rebates, grants, etc. will still lead to significant amounts of distributed generation in some locations.  For other locations, the environment won’t be nearly as conducive to strong growth.  Just as higher penetrations of distributed generation are already creating issues for some distribution organizations, there will continue to be significant increases in the amounts of distributed generation in some locations.   As a whole, solar photovoltatics are forecast to increase seven times, and they will be largely connected at distribution level. Technologies are certainly changing, and the amount of investment is still substantial.  Even though the percentage of new capacity additions that will be connected at distribution level is relatively small, they will still have significant impacts on distribution in some locations.

Since this topic interests me quite a bit, I took particular notice of the cover of IEEE Spectrum magazine in July 2012.  On the cover was a title of one of the articles inside.  It said “Commentary - Alternative Energy is a Mirage”.    Contained in the well-respected Spectrum magazine, I had to take a look.

In the article, Vaclav Smil makes various points that the only way that renewable generation, except for hydro and geothermal, has made any headway at all is through government subsidies.   Low capacity factors, high installation and interconnection costs, and new technologies to economically recover natural gas make renewable generation, such as solar and wind, uncompetitive compared to other generation types.   And the tremendous investment and inertia that is built into our existing energy infrastructure means that even if renewable energy reaches economic partity, it will take many, many decades to switch society over to renewables in substantial quantities.

Of course, common prevailing thought is that we must invest in renewables, or run the possibility of increasing global temperatures due to the emissions of greenhouse gases.  However, if global warming is real, then it is a global problem, and not a national problem.  We share the earth’s atmosphere with all other countries on earth.  And Dr. Smil makes this eye-opening comparison:  Between 2004 and 2009 the US added about 28 GW of wind turbines.  If we account for the low capacity factor of wind, this is comparable to 10 GW of coal-fired capacity.  The US should pat itself on the back and rest assured that it is making a significant contribution to the reduction in global warming, right?  Well, during that same period, China installed 30 times as much coal-fired generating capacity.   Through 2015, it is projected that China will add another 200 GW of coal-fired generation, or another 200 large coal plants.

It begs the question – is the investment in renewable energy really the most-cost effective use of the US’s research and development funding for reducing generation’s environmental impacts?  Or are there other alternatives, such as carbon capture technologies, that should be getting more funding?   You can read Dr. Smil’s commentary in Spectrum here   http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/a-skeptic-looks-at-alternative-energy/0.

FREEDM Center Visit at NC State

I recently had lunch with Dr. David Lubkeman, Research Professor and Instructor at North Carolina State University and the FREEDM.    The FREEDM Systems Center, which is the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery Systems and Management Center, is funded by multiple parties, including the National Science Foundation and industry sponsors.  NC State has a long tradition in electric power systems engineering, with many of today’s power engineers having used the classic textbook Elements of Power System Analysis, authored by the late Dr. William Stevenson of NC State, and later updated by Dr. John Grainger at NC State.  I was fortunate to have worked with Drs. Stevenson, Grainger, and Lubkeman during my graduate studies at NC State, and it is great to see Dave as part of the successful FREEDM Systems Center project - http://www.freedm.ncsu.edu/

The FREEDM center was started in 2008, with an $18.5 million dollar grant from the NSF.  The FREEDM’s center has multiple goals that include the performance of fundamental breakthrough technology in energy storage and power semiconductor devices, developing enabling technologies for subsystem and system demonstrations, and developing a one-megawatt FREEDM green energy hub system to power the Engineering Research Center’s headquarters and other buildings on NC State's Centennial Campus

The FREEDM Center has multiple university partners, including Arizona State University, Florida State University, Florida A&M, and Missouri Science and Technology University.  It also includes universities in Germany, Switzerland, and New Zealand.  ABB, parent company of my employer Ventyx, is an industry partner with the FREEDM Center.

Among the many FREEDM projects and graduate student projects that Dave showed me was the prototype of a power electronic distribution transformer that was being designed and assembled.  Most of the hundreds of millions of distributions transformers in service around the world today are constructed with components such as iron cores, paper insulation, and mineral oil.  The power electronic distribution transformer would replace all these components with solid-state semi-conductors.  Maybe even more interesting, the FREEDM system is working on a distribution transformer that not only converts medium-voltage to the low-voltage ac power that is universal on electric utility secondary systems today, but it would also have a low-voltage DC bus.  This would permit the increasing amounts of dc loads that are present today, such as computing equipment power supplies, renewable energy sources such as solar, and energy storage devices to plug directly into a DC bus,  eliminating their need for their own ac-to-dc power converters.  (On a separate note:  ABB, which has long been the leader in DC power applications, including high-voltage DC (HVDC) for power transmission, is now providing DC data center solutions, which offer the advantages of higher efficiencies, less space, and reduces equipment and installation costs.   http://www.abb.com/cawp/seitp202/187b2f29acaea090c1257a0e0029fb1a.aspx)

The “War of the Currents” was declared by many to be over in the 1890’s, when the ac technology systems supported by Westinghouse and Tesla proved superior to Edison’s dc technology systems.  Low-voltage dc technology may be able to borrow from Mark Twain, who said “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

For electric distribution engineers such as myself, it is wonderful to see such innovative R&D being performed on the electric power distribution system, as the FREEDM center is doing.