Archived Utility Notes
Published in 2013

Utilities Want Solar Customers to Pay More
by cassandra sweet

People with solar panels on their roofs often get a pretty good price break on their energy bills.

Too good, some utilities say.Now, utilities in several states—including the country's sunniest, California and Arizona—are trying to do something about it.

Here's the issue: For most homes, solar panels don't generate all the power the residents use. At night and on cloudy days, and sometimes even on sunny days, these homes draw power from the grid that serves all a utility's customers. But at other times, the panels generate more power than the home is using, and that surplus power flows into the grid.

Under state rules known as net metering, customers are credited on their bills for any power that flows from their homes to the grid, usually at the same rate they pay when they draw power from the grid.

So, customers with solar panels not only are buying less electricity from their utilities, but also are able to offset much of the cost of what they do buy. continued…

first published week of: 09/23/2013

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Wal-Mart and Apple Make a Big Push Into Solar
by travis hoium

One sign of the long-term viability of solar power is how quickly corporate America has been putting solar panels on unused rooftop space. A recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association says that Wal-Mart Costco, Kohl's, and Apple are the top four companies installing solar in the U.S. and they're just getting started.

Wal-Mart led the list last year with 65 MW and if you need any evidence that solar saves money you don't need to go any further than that. Wal-Mart is no charity case and if power from the sun weren't saving the company money it wouldn't do it. Over the past year, another 24.4 MW was put up at Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers, which was second only to Apple.

	Cumulative Installed-2012	Cumulative Installed-2013
Wal-Mart	65 MW	89.4 MW
Costco	38.9 MW	47.1 MW
Kohl's	36.5 MW	44.72 MW
Apple	<3.3 MW	40.7 MW
IKEA	21.5 MW	35.1 MW

Source: Solar Energy Industries Association

The retail stores are using their massive rooftop space to expand into solar. Wal-Mart partnered with SolarCity earlier this year to install solar power on another 60 stores in California, part of the company's goal to have solar on 130 stores, or 75% of its stores in the state. continued…

first published week of: 10/28/2013

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Want a stable grid? Tune the generators, researchers say

Researchers have discovered that there's more to power grid synchronization than the transmission lines alone. According to a report on phys.org, researchers at Northwestern University, Stanford and Los Alamos National Laboratory found that “the leading factor for grid stability is not the network structure itself, which most previous studies have focused on, but the relation between the network structure, the state of the grid, and certain parameters of the generators.”

Stability of synchronized states in power grids can be enhanced, the researchers determined, by tuning generator parameters rather than modifying the entire network. The phys.org report goes on to explain:

“In the future, a smart grid could measure the state of the grid with high-speed sensors called phasor measurement units, and then communicate the data to an online control system that could adjust the parameters of the generators as necessary. In this way, smart grids could act as self-healing systems that can quickly recover from failures without human intervention, as well as help prevent failures from occurring in the first place.”

Results of the study are published in Nature Physics.

Details Here

first published week of: 03/11/2013

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Want to Save Energy? There’s an App for That!
by paula felps

Leafully is one of many smartphone apps that helps people understand and better manage their energy usage. Photo: Melanie Medina

There are many ways to manage your home’s energy usage, from using programmable thermostats to installing stand-alone home energy management systems. But did you know you can also use your smartphone or tablet to start saving money on energy? Some options include:

Kill-Ur-Watts
iGo Vampire Power Calculator
Thermostat apps
Energy UFO+

With new apps constantly surfacing, there are lots of ways for you to better manage energy usage. continued…

first published week of: 08/26/2013

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Warren Buffett Invests Over $2B In Solar Power Projects In California
by mandy adwell

Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company has just purchased two SunPower solar photovoltaic power plant projects in California for $2-2.5 billion – a pretty gigantic deal.

The Antelope Valley Solar Projects will be built in Los Angeles and Kern counties, generating 579 megawatts of electricity for Southern California’s Edison utility. That’s equal to a large fossil fuel power plant at peak output levels.

SunPower will build and operate the projects for MidAmerican Renewables, which is a division of MidAmerican Energy and controlled by Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway.

This isn’t the only solar deal Buffett has taken on recently. MidAmerican Energy also owns Topaz Solar Farms, a 550-megawatt plant in San Luis County, California by First Solar. It also holds a 49% stake in a 290-megawatt plant in Yuma, Arizona.

Construction for the latest projects is scheduled to begin later this year, and the plants are expected to go online at the end of 2015.

Details Here

first published week of: 01/14/2013

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Web-based SCADA Gathers More Fans
by james r. koelsch for automationworld

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) has been around for decades. But it shines like new for companies like Arrow Energy Pty. Ltd., a coal-seam gas company in Queensland, Australia.

More operations are noticing that SCADA’s underlying technologies, as well as the practices for applying them, have continued to evolve over the years. As a consequence, these companies see SCADA in a new light and are taking advantage of the fresh opportunities it is presenting them.

One such opportunity is quick access to data from remote locations. “The single greatest advance in SCADA is probably digital communications,” explains Gerry Browne, engineering manager at Phoenix-based Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywell.com/ps).

Details Here

first published week of: 03/11/2013

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What Municipal Utilities Want From the Smart Grid
by jeff st. john

What do America’s municipal utilities really want out of the smart grid?

Here’s one snapshot answer to that question, courtesy of GTM Research, which polled 97 muni executives and managers on what they see as the top three benefits of implementing smart grid technologies. The responses may surprise you:

continued…

first published week of: 06/10/2013

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When Should Nuclear Power Plants Die?
by james conca

Certainly not before their time.

The owners of two nuclear power plants, Kewaunee and Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Stations, recently decided to shut them down about 20 years before they needed to be. The owners indicated that the plants were no longer economical due to market conditions – the low price of natural gas, an insufficient electricity demand in the region, and the presence of renewable energy suppliers that are so subsidized and mandated they can bid in the negative numbers and still receive revenue for every kilowatt-hour generated.

It’s quite bizarre how we now determine economic viability. When other generating systems like gas or wind shut down, they are put in temporary shutdown so they can be restarted when market conditions change, like will happen when liquefied natural gas becomes America’s next great export and the world market sets our natural gas prices. At which time they will double.

But these nuclear plants are not being put in temporary shutdown, even though they have another 20 years of life, over a hundred billion more kWhrs at less than 2 g of CO2 per kWhr.

Why?

And why go into decommissioning status when they could sell electricity at about 5-cents a kWhr and fuel costs less than a cent of that? continued…

first published week of: 09/09/2013

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Who’s really controlling the grid?
by liz forrest

While for the better part of a decade we have known cybersecurity as a possible threat , the threat has become real and is actively affecting our nation’s utilities. In the past few months alone, accusations have been leveled against both China and Iran for attempting to hack into our nation’s energy system. While the threat is not new, it is indeed real. In addition to malware threats, the grid could be susceptible to disruption via physical threats such as electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and geomagnetic disturbance (GMD).

We wanted to look at what was actually being done within the utility community to address these risks, and what needs to be done in the immediate future. After all, it has been more than six years ago that the first known cyber attack, which was a controlled attack, undertaken by Homeland Security at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where it was demonstrated how an attacker could hack into the control system of an electric generator or other rotating equipment connected to the grid and throw the equipment out of phase, causing severe physical damage to the equipment. continued…

first published week of: 08/19/2013

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Why Telecoms Need GIS
by skye perry

This month I wanted to take a break from writing on technical concepts or focusing on new technology to jump on a brief editorial bandwagon. It’s a story I’ve told more times that I can count which made it a good candidate to share with you all.

If you’ve read my posts over the last year, you know I’ve been focusing more and more on GIS for telecom and specifically my implementation work with Schneider Electric’s Fiber Manager product. This is directly related to the work I’ve been performing with various clients and the surge in growth we’ve seen in the telecom GIS market over the last several years.

In fact, whereas we’ve seen solid growth industry-wide for electric, gas, and water solutions at a rate of around 30% a year, telecom grew last year at a rate of close to 300%. This fact is partially due to the maturation of the GIS software offerings for telecom, but is more significantly tied to the fact that telecoms have not historically used GIS and they are finally realizing the value that GIS can bring to their businesses. BUT this is not always the case.

Our largest US telecoms are still not using GIS-based telecom management systems to manage their networks, their assets, or their sales organizations. My story starts with a little history of SSP Innovations. continued…

first published week of: 09/16/2013