Posts Tagged ‘smart meter’

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Power consumption reaches new peaks in Texas, ERCOT narrowly avoids rolling blackouts

August 13, 2011

Michael Giberson

Much in the news in Texas these past few weeks have been new peak power records and several grid emergency conditions which saw the ERCOT power system narrowly avoid rolling blackout a time or two. Tom Fowler of the Houston Chronicle‘s Fuel Fix blog has been tracking the story closely, see selected links below.

Rebecca Smith provided a broad view of the events in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. She reports that power consumption has reached levels this summer than ERCOT had forecast would not be reached until 2014. Eight times this summer power consumption has exceeded the previous record, set last year, 65,766 MW. The new record, set August 3, is 68,294 MW.

Smith’s article reports some concern about the future ability of ERCOT to meet rising demand, given the lack of regulatory tools to push companies to build more power plants. Fortunately, powerful economic incentives are at work:

While most power in Texas sells for negotiated prices spelled out in long-term contracts between generators and power retailers, the grid operator also procures electricity to keep the system in balance. The price paid in this auction readjusts every 15 minutes. When supplies are thin, prices can rise rapidly.

As a result of record electricity consumption, prices repeatedly hit $3,000 a megawatt hour last week, which is three times the maximum amount that generators can charge in deregulated electricity markets in the eastern U.S. (Electricity markets in Texas have rules created by state authorities, whereas other deregulated U.S. power markets are guided by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.)

Note that the presence of long-term contracts at prices significantly lower than $3,000 per MW h doesn’t diminish incentive effects, since at the margin conservation or additional consumption faces that price. Also, the expectations now being formed concerning next summer’s average prices will factor in recent experiences and shift the prices higher for future power contracts.

Those powerful economic forces at work will be signaling to both generators and retailers. I am a little surprised that Retail Electric Providers in ERCOT are not yet offering smart-grid enabled products involving price-sensitive (or emergency grid condition-based) demand response, but I’ll be much more surprised if such products are not available before next summer.

MORE: FuelFix.com ERCOT story highlights from the past two weeks:

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets, Regulation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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Texas gaining smart grid buzz

May 25, 2011

Michael Giberson

Texas is becoming a recognized leader in smart grid development, and just wait, it is going to get better. One external bit of circumstantial evidence for this claim comes from a meeting last week at the White House hosted by Aneesh Chopra, Assistant to the President and Associate Director for Technology within the White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy. When Chopra wanted to discuss the smart grid, he called on Texans: Barry Smitherman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Brewster McCracken of the Pecan Street Project in Austin, and representatives from Dallas-based Oncor, Houston-based CenterPoint Energy and Houston-based Reliant Energy. In addition, folks from Itron (Spokane, WA), Landis+Gyr (UK), and the Zigbee Alliance (San Ramon, CA) will be participating.

There are two sides to the smart grid world: the wires company-style improvements and the retail customer revolution. Things are happening in Texas on both sides. The wires company developments will come sooner, because it provides a foundation for the customer-side developments and because it is easier for incumbent utilities to understand and deploy. The retail customer revolution belongs to today’s innovators and explorers, who are likely not today’s well-established incumbents. The revolution will be slower, because in general consumers are reasonably happy with their power suppliers and don’t do much active shopping around. Eventually, however, it will be revolutionary.

Lots of places have rolled out smart meters, and utility smart grid investments are happening many places as well. But for the most part a smart meter tied to a customer on a cost-of-service regulated flat-rate tariff is like owning a smart phone connected to the Ma Bell monopoly of last century. There may be a certain cachet for gadget geeks in having such a thing, but otherwise it mostly just sits there.

Texas has, in the ERCOT-linked parts of the state, all of the pieces in place for a customer-driven revolution: the Texas competitive retail market, smart metering, a competitive wholesale market, and use of true interval meter data rather than load profiles to allocate wholesale costs to retailers. Consumers will better understand their use of electric power, that understanding will inform their energy choices, a competitive retail market place will allow creative retailers to work with customers to enhance their energy choices, the retailers will begin to engage the wholesale market differently, and the competitive wholesale market will adapt to the changing demands of power customers.

There is a lot of exciting engineering work happening, in Texas and elsewhere, but when it comes to a dynamic retail market that can make the most of that engineering work, Texas is the only place in the United States with a good foundation.

Posted in Economics, Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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Faruqui and Toney debate smart meters and dynamic pricing

March 2, 2011

Michael Giberson

Dr. Ahmad Faruqui of The Brattle Group and Dr. Mark Toney of TURN discuss dynamic pricing for retail electric customers in a February 17, 2011 event in San Francisco.

Part 1:

Part 2 Q&A:

I’ve only had time to watch a bit of this, but with Faruqui and Toney the program is self-recommending for anyone interested in electric power prices.

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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A reporter with an in-home energy monitor and a blog

November 5, 2010

Michael Giberson

After months of paying a ‘smart meter’ surcharge on his power bill, Houston Chronicle energy reporter Tom Fowler finally had a smart meter installed by CenterPoint Energy several weeks back and more recently an in-home energy monitor. He’s blogging the revolution:

When the word gets out about toasters, they may be relegated to museums and history books. One wonders what other changes this slow motion revolution may bring.

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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Technology + dynamic pricing conserves water too (duh)

April 16, 2010

Lynne Kiesling

I love this story; it’s like Knowledge Problem + Aguanomics = individual choice, efficiency, conservation, and elegance. Water conservation is a large and growing concern, in large part because our public policy does such an abominable job of creating a framework/market design to send good scarcity signals to diverse individual users, and to enable them to trade rights among those uses. But in many places, water use also means electricity use, because of the large pumping demand associated with it.

That combination of water use and electricity use provided the impetus for a recent pilot study in California:

A pilot study conducted last summer in Palm Desert, Calif., suggests that they can.

The study, financed by the California Energy Commission, asked participants — who were paid $25 a month — to reduce their water use at “peak” times. A peak time refers to the hours when electricity use is at or near its daily high, and therefore especially expensive.

For Palm Desert, those hours are noon to 6 p.m.

The participants were given so-called “smart water meters” that recorded their water use at 15-minute intervals. Crucially, the meters also enabled participants to see how much water they were using — information that is unavailable to most households.

The results were striking: at peak times, participating homeowners used less than half the amount of water as those in the control group. The homeowners’ total use also ended up being 17 percent lower than the control group’s.

There are a few interesting aspects of this study. Note first that the payment to the homeowner was a lump sum. There is not a dynamic price per unit of water consumed, nor is there even a time-of-use peak-off-peak price structure, so the main driver of the observed conservation is the improvement in information visibility to the homeowner. The $25 lump sum payment probably contributed to raising their awareness too. A dynamic price or a TOU price is also likely to reinforce this result.

Second, note that the peak time denoted here was the peak electricity price time. The article indicates that the 50% reduction in peak water use did not lead to a commensurate reduction in electricity demand, although there was some reduction. So the relationship between water use and electricity use is quite nonlinear. One thing to consider is that in the desert a lot of people use evaporative cooling, so there is some margin of substitution between cooling using water and cooling using air conditioning.

Finally, the article points out that by making homeowners more informed and aware of their water consumption, the smart water meters helped them and the water authority to identify unknown leaks. This result was an unanticipated outcome, and identifying those unanticipated relationships is something that decentralized, individual incentive systems do best.

Posted in Economics, Environmental policy, Technology | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

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Smart meter vs. standard meter (with photos!)

April 7, 2010

Michael Giberson

Oncor has been testing smart meters in part by monitoring several several homes with side-by-side smart meter/standard meter pairs.  (See week four results from Killeen, Texas; week four results from Temple, Texas; week four results from the DFW area will be posted tomorrow, April 7, assuming Oncor sticks with their schedule.)  So far it looks like the smart meters and standard meters are keeping it close, with most of the meters no more than 4 or 5 kwh’s apart after four weeks.

One pair of meters in the Temple test is reported at 12 kwh’s apart, a difference of about $1.60 on a monthly bill, but the older meter is the one with the higher reading.

What? You don’t trust Oncor? Well they are posting photos online each week from the side-by-side meters. (Which won’t convince any skeptics, but will serve to document the historical moment.  Years from now some digital artist will be inspired to remix these images into a work of art.)

T12_April_1_2010

Posted in Electricity | Tagged | 7 Comments »

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High bills lead couple to file smart meter lawsuit against Oncor

March 30, 2010

Michael Giberson

Elizabeth Souder, the Dallas Morning News, reports on a lawsuit filed against Dallas-based wires utility Oncor claiming fraud and negligence associated with the company’s installation of smart meters.  The lawsuit can be viewed at the newly established website www.oncorlawsuit.com.  The suit seeks class action status on behalf “all consumers in Oncor’s service area who have experienced significant increases in their electric bill since the installation of a “Smart” Meter system.”

Somewhat simplified, the lawsuit tells the story of a couple who say that their electric bills increased dramatically after Oncor installed a smart meter (reportedly from $400-$700 a month before, to as much as $1800 month after), the couple engaged in several attempts to get Oncor to disclose what was wrong with the meter and came away unhappy.

Other that the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” argument and complaints about Oncor’s customer service, there isn’t much in the way of evidence in the lawsuit. I guess that is what the discovery procedure is for.  Admittedly, I don’t know the underlying facts; I’m just reacting to the appearance of a lack of merit in the lawsuit.

Maybe the message here is to install smart meters at the end of winter and the end of summer (adjusting as appropriate for local conditions).  That way, the first smart meter bills are likely to be lower than the last “dumb meter” bills. If consumers are going to leap to conclusions based on a too little data (and we will), you may as well have them leap to a conclusion in your favor.

HT to the Texas Energy and Environment Blog.

Posted in Electricity | Tagged | Comments Off

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More on Smart Meter Texas

March 26, 2010

Michael Giberson

From the Houston Chronicle, “Smart meter power usage data isn’t so current“:

A Web site touted this week as providing near real-time power use information to electricity customers with new smart meters actually delays the information by up to two days, CenterPoint Energy has acknowledged.

… The company said Monday the site would give consumers with smart meters information about their power usage in 15-minute intervals so they could make better choices about how much power they use.

Not mentioned in the news releases from the company and state regulators was that the 15-minute incremental information can take as long as 48 hours to hit the Web site.

Apparently the timeliness issue was discussed in the regulatory process that preceded roll-out of the system.  Retail electric providers favored real-time data, but “transmission companies like CenterPoint argued that consumers wouldn’t really need the data any sooner than the following day.”

I’m of about three opinions about this issue.  The article quotes the CEO of an energy management company as saying “2- to 3-day-old data … is all but useless.”  I agree, more or less.  The data isn’t useless – an interested homeowner or business manager could still learn quite a bit from examining 15-minute interval data from a few days earlier – but the delay does sap the immediacy from the system and makes it harder to put the information to use.

On the other hand, being able to access 2-day old data on power consumption at the 15-minute interval level is light-years ahead of the situation that most consumers find themselves in.  Currently I get an electric bill that reports a “previous [meter] read” and a “current [meter] read.”  No explicit dates are attached to the two bits of information, but I’m guessing the first number is from about 5 weeks before the billing date and the second one from about 1 week prior to the billing date.  This kind of meter data is “all but useless;” interval data from a few days ago would be super fantastic.

Almost no smart grid benefits will emerge directly from Smart Meter Texas, but that is okay.  It is only a taste of the possibilities, not the full smart grid smorgasbord.  This system is not “the end,” it is one beginning.

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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Responding to consumer concerns over smart meters

March 24, 2010

Michael Giberson

Smart meters have run into a bit of consumer resistance.  Some of us – no doubt crazed by the energy-econ-techno-lust possibilities – imagined that smart meters would be greeted by consumers with smiles and good cheer, and just maybe a tear or two of gratitude trickling down the consumers’ cheeks as they thank their electric utility for helping them out of the analog meter stone age.  At least according to various media reports, this scene has not been common (i.e. Consumer frustration grows over ‘smart’ meter bills; It’s come to this: Citizens against smart meters; PG&E customer revolt may threaten rollout of Obama’s smart grid (“Obama’s smart grid”? Huh??); etc.).

One response has been the recent formation of the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative, a non-profit group aimed at understanding consumer concerns and finding ways to address the concerns.

In Texas, power distribution utilities Oncor, CenterPoint, and AEP Texas have joined with smart grid device and data management companies in a more direct response: a website at www.smartmetertexas.com intended to give consumers with the new meters easy access to basic information on their power consumption.  The thinking is, apparently, that helping consumers get a taste of the “information age” possibilities will aid consumer acceptance.

(HT NewsWatch: Energy and Texas Energy and Environment Blog)

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged | 8 Comments »

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