The Smart Grid Has Arrived

A reader sends this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review: "The first comprehensive and large scale smart grid is now operating. The $800 million project, built in Florida, has made power outages shorter and less frequent, and helped some customers save money, according to the utility that operates it. ... Dozens of utilities are building smart grids — or at least installing some smart grid components, but no one had put together all of the pieces at a large scale. Florida Power & Light's project incorporates a wide variety of devices for monitoring and controlling every aspect of the grid, not just, say, smart meters in people's homes. ... Many utilities are installing smart meters — Pacific Gas & Electric in California has installed twice as many as FPL, for example. But while these are important, the flexibility and resilience that the smart grid promises depends on networking those together with thousands of sensors at key points in the grid — substations, transformers, local distribution lines, and high voltage transmission lines. (A project in Houston is similar in scope, but involves half as many customers, and covers somewhat less of the grid.) In FPL's system, devices at all of these places are networked — data jumps from device to device until it reaches a router that sends it back to the utility — and that makes it possible to sense problems before they cause an outage, and to limit the extent and duration of outages that still occur. The project involved 4.5 million smart meters and over 10,000 other devices on the grid."

But does prevent cascade failure?

[iceco2]

In many cases in the past building a power grid resilient to small power outages, automatically rerouting power around failed components
only leads to it being more susceptible to large power failures caused by cascading failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_outage [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure [wikipedia.org]

Bad data

[PPH]

My power company installed 'smart meters' and an r.f. control and data acquisition grid over a decade ago.

Several decades ago, I used to work for them. Back then, we began a task to build a database of customers, transformers, distribution lines and substation circuits. All with the idea of eventually implementing such a system. Customers records were linked to a 'grid number' which was tied to their serving transformer, circuit and substation. These grid numbers are actually put on every pole (and other physical asset) in the company.

One of my engineering tasks was to review and correct errors in the database. At times, reports were generated that showed one small transformer feeding 50 or 100 customers (impossible without burning it up). A quick field review showed that many customers had been assigned to a few grid numbers many miles away. My suspicion was that some engineers were completing their paperwork sitting in a bar and these grid numbers were the ones visible out the front window.

Fast forward to a few years ago: My cabin (build recently) lost power when a tree took out my service line during a large storm. After doing repairs, I called the power company (I no longer worked for for the past few decades). I told the service rep that I would be ready to have the transformer re-energized. She said, "Sorry. We have to wait for the other customers on that transformer to have their services inspected." Well, I happen to be down a long, lonely road. And my cabin is the only one feeding from that point. I know this because that used to be my business. I explained this to the c.s.r. She said, "But the computer says ..."

"The computer's data is screwed up. It was screwed up 20 years ago when I worked there. It still is. Send a lineman out to put the fuse back in." She did.

If this little anecdote reflects the current state of even a fraction of our utility infrastructure, its going to take much more than a few smart meters to straighten this mess out.