Smart Grid Came to Rescue in Hurricane Sandy

Thanks so much to Sustainable Business for this great article on how our investments in smart grids are starting to pay off.

This is an important article, with multiple points worth noting, so we'll run it over two days and follow up with  a radio show looking at smart and microgrids.

Here's Part One:

SustainableBusiness.com News

"About 8 million people lost their power when Hurricane Sandy swept through and most of them had to call their utility to report the outage. 

That's because the US has a centralized grid that's far from "smart," but investments in the US smart grid under President Obama's Recovery Act helped. 

Utility Pepco, which serves Washington DC and parts of Maryland, was able to restore power for 130,000 homes in just two days after the hurricane hit.

Thanks to smart meters (two-way meters) installed in 425,000 homes, Pepco was notified by the meters' "no power" signal that allowed it to quickly pinpoint where outages were in the network. The signals arrived at their central monitoring post, allowing them to respond to customers quickly and effectively.

Then Pepco used advanced switches to automatically reroute power to where it's needed rather than having to fix the entire transmission line.

After power was restored, Pepco could "ping" meters to verify service - no need to send a crew or make a phone call.

There are now 400 centralized monitoring posts across the US and 1000 more are planned by the end of next year.

Another hallmark of the smart grid are microgrids, which are just getting off the ground. These smaller, distributed systems, which could run on renewable energy, would operate independently from the grid, allowing energy to be generated even if the broader network is down.

Last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) began enforcing Order 1000, which requires grid operators to collaborate on regional planning and allow independent developers to compete with traditional utilities in building new power lines.

Hurricane Sandy has brought widespread recognition of the lack of resiliency of the US grid, which is aging and antiquated. ..."

We love this combination of smart grids managing and reporting on power fluctuations, while microgrids get us away from centralized plants and, possibly, away from widespread, long-term power loss.

More tomorrow.