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Smart Grid Visit New Orleans (or it takes a hurricane)

Sep 4, 2007 -

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Partially funded with a $13.3M DOE grant, Southwire just installed a superconducting cable at an two Entergy substations in Louisiana. The superconducting cable eases electrical congestion. The good news is that the award was made in June and installation was completed by the end of August this year. The not so good news is that DOE grants for transmission hardware are not what the Smart Grid is about. It would be preferable to see this DOE funding focused on digitization of the grid with meters, controls and measurement systems. The House of Representatives has proposed $1.25B in similar funding through 2012. Let's hope that this funding is directed at digitizing the grid and not just replacing hardware that needs replacement.

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There is more to the smart grid than digitization

I tend to disagree with your statement that transmission hardware is not part of the smart grid - bits and bytes are important, but they can't stand alone. If we want to truly modernize the grid, almost every aspect of it needs to be gradually upgraded, redesigned, and integrated using a wide variety of new technologies involving electrical, chemical, civil, computer, and other engineering and physical disciplines. In the Northeast US, transmission corridor congestion coupled with a desire to build new transmission assets underground to minimize environmental impact has required the application of low capacitance cable as well as the use of advanced transmission system modeling and design techniques to validate new ways of controlling and operating such a system - that qualifies as a smart grid application in my book. Similarly, deploying superconducting cable technology in the transmission system brings fundamentally new physics and hence fundamentally new engineering practice to the grid. Such innovation opens up a new universe of how power systems can be designed and operated - now that's smart.

Erich W. Gunther - 11/01/2007 - 00:41

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