The $3.4Billion in grants for smart grid technology that were awarded yesterday are the single largest one-day award from the stimulus bill. There are 100 companies involved in the projects that are within 49 states, excluding Alaska. The funds will go into the accounts of awardees within 60 days, and the projects are projected to take between 12 and 36 months.

The largest technology  element of this award is for smart meters, paying for 18 million smart meters in homes to allow homeowners to better manager their energy use. There are 700 automated substations included, which will allow utilities to quickly restore power in the event of emergencies. And there will be 200,000 smart transformers.

Details on the 100 grants that were awarded can be found in this PDF Document, including coverage maps.

Intelligent metering is a European project that was focused upon building capacity about the use and application of intelligent metering across Europe. While it ended in 2006, several useful resources are available on the site. The “objective of the project was to maximize the energy savings available across Europe through the use of intelligent metering and behavioral changes of building occupants. This project has aimed to demonstrate and promote the savings available from the use of intelligent metering and training occupants in public buildings and to show that these savings can be achieved at little, or no, additional cost.”

Currently, an Intelligent Metering Initiative in the UK involves a broad range of industry partners. The European Union also covers Intelligent Metering through the European Intelligent Energy portal. Several Management Tools for INtelligent Metering are also available via Energy Europe.

Rail Energy (Innovative Integrated Energy Efficiency Solutions for Railway Rolling Stock, Rail Infrastructure and Train Operation) is a 4 year project running from 2006 until September 2009 that is funded by the European Commission and supported through the European 6th Framework for research.  The project is oriented toward increasing energy efficient throughout the rail industry across Europe.

“Inter-relationship of railway sub-systems is highly complex, especially with regard to assessing their consumption of energy. Railenergy therefore will develop a fully integrated approach as the only way to achieve true energy savings. Railenergy also aims to generate new validation standards for the energy performance of products and services and to contribute to the European harmonisation process.”

Since most railways are powered through overhead electricity, then efficiency is related to the production and delivery of energy. However, improvements in rolling stock and locomotive design are also significant factors toward achieving higher efficiency.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the new Bentley Substation V8i product yesterday. The software is the first of it’s type on the market and a major step ahead to intelligent 3D modelling for electrical substation planning, operation and lifecycle management.

Richard Zambuni of Bentley Systems introduced the new product saying, “utility operations today have operated in a similar way for decades and this product will open the door to the 21st century utility.”  He indicated that this product will bring a major change from operating in 2D to operating in 3D for electrical utilities.

Major drivers for this product include a need for increased collaboration and changing patterns in energy supply and demand.

Substations are changing. Smart Grids need to be re-designed to allow for the step-down of all forms of power types (non-renewable and renewable) from generating sources. Current growth in substations is rapid and required to meet these needs.

The needs for utility modelling include (3D):

1) Integrates physical design

2) Creates information model

3) Collaboration between individual and groups

4) Documentation creation 100%

Bentley Substation V8i is estimated to produce a gain of 30% in design time and capable of achieving upwards of 60% reduction in building costs due to increased efficiency – fewer design hours, fewer errors and faster approvals.

Major gains include:

• Intelligent substation information models that allow distributed users to work efficiently with federated data in a single environment;
• The most complete set of substation engineering and design tools available with a common graphical user interface, making the software easy to learn;
• Integration with the ProjectWise system for connecting people and information to facilitate engineering content management and team collaboration in support of streamlined workflows.

Bentley Substation V8i also includes an inventory of 2 million common electrical parts that users can include immediately into their designs. The company is aiming the product directly into the growing Smart Grid energy and electricity market place. China is anticipated to see the largest growth and the product will become available shortly.

IBERDROLA Engineering and Construction in Spain has been testing the software prior during the development stages and notes considerable gains in integrating their work flow processes.

The design of substations can now be coupled to the traditional 2D drawings. But important benefits are also being realised through being able to work in 3D, such as avoidance of clashes, improved measurement and better communication of designs for approval.

This is a major step forward in terms of intelligent utility design. Bentley Systems is already a significant player in the utility market from design through to de-commissioning, and the product fits in well to the already existing product offering.

More information:

Press Release

Seminars on Demand/Live

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF in Magdeburg, Germany have been addressing the issue of designing new power plants in a virtual environment.  Their work has “developed a method that visualizes the processes inside energy conversion plants, e.g. such as photovoltaic, wind, biogas and hydroelectric power stations. To do so, they have coupled 3-D plant engineering and  simulation results with a virtual reality (VR) program developed at the IFF. “A special software tool has enabled us to visualize all the motion sequences  for the first time ever – at  just the push of a button,” explains Dr. Matthias Gohla, Manager of the Process and Plant Engineering Business Unit.

Learn more about this work.

The power industry in Europe has requested that changes include incentives for them to develop new smart grids.

Electrical power production in Europe is heavily regulated through monopolies currently and smart grids differ in their approach to the production of electricity.

“Smart grids introduce information technology to electricity transportation, allowing energy to flow in two directions. This gives them a superior capacity to integrate both small and large-scale renewable energy into the grid. It allows households to produce their own renewable energy and sell it back to the grid,” states a EurActiv report.

Zambia has decided to pursue a course that would see the country connect 1,270 separate power growth centres. All Africa reports that in view of the lack of grid infrastructure, and the rising need for electrification across the country, Zambia will pursue separated energy sources of a renewable nature.

Each centre may use a different source of energy and the concept would see most populated and rural areas in particular, coming on stream with continuous power much sooner than anticipated.

Business Daily reports that Africa is going to be facing more power shortages once the current economic crisis ends. The ironic fact is that the continent has considerable energy resources.

Francois Nguyen, senior policy advisor at the International Energy Agency, told a power and electricity conference in Johannesburg the economic recession was deterring investors in the power sector across the continent.

Much of the hype around Smart Grid technology evolves around customer-oriented transparency. The use of smart meters enables detailed reporting and feedback that will drive consumers to conserve, which could add up to enormous energy savings and remove the need to build more power plants.

Making the rest of the grid smart is on the agenda, but it’s more of a daunting task. Beyond smart meters, there’s a need to automate transformers, substations and control centers for quick and efficient switching with demand. The technology to make switching automated aren’t quite there yet, but there are a number of things that can be done now on the broader grid.

Reacting to Energy Fluctuation

The additional of renewable energy plants and distributed energy generation at the home introduces power sources that fluctuate with weather and other variables. Without the reliability of centralized plants, there’s a need to manage weather related drop offs in power availability.

Demand response is one means to do this, and it’s accomplished by signing customers up to shed their power when demand hits a peak. These customers are compensated with lower rates in order to put up with outages that can become frequent during seasons of high demand. It’s an answer, but it’s by no means an elegant solution.

Another solution is to add storage capacity on the grid that can offload demand on the grid. Battery energy storage systems at large scale are one means to address the issue with tested technology. There are other ideas, such as running compressors to pressurize gas during off-peak times, and then using the pressure to power a turbine to generate additional power when needed.

Modeling Demand

To date, there’s really very little modeling of the  capacity and performance of the transmission and distribution grid. While the ultimate goal is the installation of sophisticated sensors to all nodes on the grid, a good first step would be to better model the infrastructure and performance of what currently exists.

The creation of a highly accurate, and geospatially-correct, grid infrastructure is mostly in place trhough large utilities. With this asset management step now mostly complete, it needs to be enhanced with to include rudimentary grid use and performance. Smart meters at the household level will eventually fill in the full performance perspective, but the initial mapping of performance at a macro scale is needed for optimal planning.

Multiple Approaches and Motives

At this early stage of Smart Grid development, there are a number of test deployments taking place nationally. There are a number of approaches that can be taken with Smart Grid development with different mixes of sensor equipment, feedback and customer-facing enablement. There’s certainly no best way yet, and best practices are only starting to be proven. Given the early days, there are a number of different strategies and motivations.

Some utilities are looking to the Smart Grid as a means to help them get their IT house in order, with all the various systems, such as outage management, customer service and workforce management, all coming together more concisely in an operations setting. Others see the creation of a Smart Grid as the ultimate means to make the grid more reliable, as grid outage is a very costly hit to economic productivity. And others see the grid as a motivation and means to incorporate more renewable energy, both at the plant and the household level.

The realization of Smart Grid technology will be huge boost to efficiency that promises to help drive down greenhouse gas, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and empower consumers to conserve and save. The dollars are flowing from government sources and private equity. Let’s forge forward with measured and methodical approaches that create lasting and high-performance infrastructure that will stand the test of time.

Investors.com reports that EnergyAustralia has signed with IBM for the delivery and operation of electricity control and monitoring networking.  These facilities are capable of monitoring and managing energy distribution and use across the entire network.

IBM has been working on Intelligent Utility Networks recently. An example of this work and more information can be found he