Utilities experiment on the rural Northwest
Real-time response to demand could radically shift how the grid operates.
The northwestern Wyoming town of Bondurant, population 100, is little more than horse pastures punctuated by a handful of rustic homes, along with a lone restaurant, the Branding Iron Cafe, and, next door, the tiny post office. Postmistress Amy Joe Stern tries to keep the power bill down at this small rural facility. So she jumped at a chance to get a $15-per-month credit from Lower Valley Energy, the utility cooperative that serves roughly 26,000 homes and businesses in the area.
Lower Valley pays the Bondurant Post Office and some 500 other volunteer customers for allowing the utility to connect small gray boxes to their electric water heaters. Whenever electricity demand is highest across Lower Valley’s grid — usually in the morning, when office lights and work machinery flip on while home water heaters are still cranking after morning showers — the utility sends a signal over the power lines to the boxes, telling the water heaters, which are major power gulpers, to turn off until energy use drops.
It’s called demand response, and it represents a radical shift in the operation of the power grid. Traditionally, grid operators react to fluctuations in demand, or load, by throttling power plants and hydroelectric dams, ensuring that the amount of electricity they’re producing equals the amount their customers are using at any moment. With demand response, they can also react by adjusting the load, curbing customers’ energy use instead of, say, revving up a natural gas plant.
Most of today’s grid, however, is antiquated and “dumb.” Grid operators aren’t able to monitor what’s going on with it remotely and they often find out about outages only when they get irate phone calls. And the system’s not equipped to allow the type of interactive exchange mentioned above. Bondurant’s gray boxes are a small step toward making the grid “smart,” a broad term describing a grid equipped with two-way communication and computer monitoring capabilities. As these technologies are implemented, it could revolutionize the grid in the same way that smartphones have replaced landlines. Lower Valley, together with 10 other utilities in the region, is part of an experiment called the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project to see what that looks like.
Comments about this article
We should be focusing on being smarter about our energy usage rather than just drilling anywhere and everywhere - getting back to a conservation ethic. Unfortunately, without pricing signals at the individual/family level, and without factoring in externalities for fossil fuel-based power generation and use, the answer is too often to just increase supply and let communities (taxpayers) pay for the messes caused by mostly unchecked exploration.
And, of course, there's always the battle with and within utilities that try to balance needed conservation and profit, so those who employ distributed generation are too often seen as the bad guys rather than essential pieces of the large and complex energy equation.
In any case, glad to see this article - definitely a great example of why I subscribe to HCN. Thanks!