6 smart grid projects with big ambitions

Improving the electrical infrastructure out west

Remember the cascading blackouts that hit the southwest earlier this month? Once Cisco and Harris Corp.  finish the wide-area network (WAN) they are creating for the Western Electric Coordinating Council (WECC), those kind of system disruptions should be easier to detect and avert. WECC's role is to coordinate the bulk electric system reliability for the Western U.S., Canada and part of Mexico.  According to a Cisco blog post, last year WECC put out a call for a WAN that would interconnect 19 participating utilities with two large WECC data centers in Washington State and Colorado as part of the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative.  Cisco and Harris were tapped to provide a secure, robust data measurement and communications infrastructure for the synchophasor system that is scheduled for completion in 2013.

In Fort Collins, it's all about layering multiple smart grid apps

Fort Collins Utilities plans to migrate all of its customers to AMI over the next two years by installing Elster EnergyAxis electric and water meters. Tropos GridCom will provide the communications infrastructure for the AMI data backhaul and future aggregation of smart grid applications across the service territory, as Tropos technology is capable of layering multiple applications on top of the single communications system. Elster’s EnergyAxis Gatekeeper will be used as the metering LAN to connect smart power and water meters while Tropos GridCom will provide wireless broadband backhaul from that metering LAN to the utility's existing fiber network.

Storing North Sea wind power in smart household heaters

Over in the Shetland Islands, located 170 miles northeast of Scotland, there is no connection to the UK electric grid and its main oil-fired power plant is reaching the end of its life. But what the Islands do have is enormous wind energy potential due to their North Sea exposure. So considering options, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) – the local electric utility – decided to tap that potential by developing a smart grid and using smart energy storage systems. As part of its solution, SSE is fitting 1,000 homes on the Islands with Dimplex smart electric thermal storage heaters and hot water tanks.  The utility plans to use some of the excess electricity from the wind turbines to supply reduced-rate electricity direct to those customers with the next-generation storage heaters installed. The utility will manage demand from a central location by sending commands to the various devices.

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