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By Doug Peeples
SGN News Editor
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Kurt Yeager isn't just another bright, well-intentioned, fired-up smart grid advocate. He doesn't just want the smart grid to be reliable, safe and green — he wants it to be perfect, and he's got the background and experience to know what that means.
Yeager was formerly the president and CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute and today serves as the executive director of the Galvin
Electricity Initiative.
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He offered his assessment of the status of the U.S. electricity infrastructureand smart grid initiatives during the recent Smart Grid Oregon public policy conference in Portland.
The no-frills version of his description of the smart grid goes like this: "The fundamental issue of the smart grid is a seamless system that provides electricity supply and demand all the time."
Why do we need to spend a lot of money and effort on a smart grid, some might ask? "We have one of the least reliable power systems in the world," Yeager said. "The average American has four hours of outages a year compared to seven minutes in Japan." He added, almost as a very hefty afterthought, that the current electricity infrastructure is costing the country $1 trillion a year. Even short outages are devastating, particularly in the business and industrial sectors where losses are figured in the billions. Yeager also argues that the introduction of more than a single digit percentage of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar "will trash the system without a backup source of power, probably natural gas-fired plants, or storage we don't have today."
Fortunately, Yeager is an optimist (though it may not seem like it). But he's unflinching about what it will take to truly unlock the benefits of the smart grid: intelligent technology, empowered consumers and intelligent policies. And since the Smart Grid Oregon conference was about policy, he outlined what those policies should address. It's a long list, so we've scaled it down to what you might call the basics:
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Transparent real-time pricing for consumers
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All customer-specific data belongs to the customer
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Strict distribution reliability and efficiency standards
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Utilities publicly accountable to specific system performance standards
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Link utility earnings to service quality, not quantity of sales (performance-based rates)
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Expand net metering to include physical and virtual aggregation
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Enable retail energy management service competition to promote entrepreneurial and utility innovation
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Require absolute interoperability of smart grid components, including security
Obviously, some of Yeager's policies are likely to infuriate while others are in line with mainstream thinking in the smart grid ecosystem. He just wants it to be perfect.
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