Carleton University 20160324

Safe Start slide
Highlight the importance of safety and not only technology in the context of a smart grid. Use my
earliest memory (screwdriver in electrical wall socket) and said screwdriver as example.
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In the 1880s, Nikola Tesla invented the 3-phase 60 Hz technology still used in the North American
electrical grid, which was then commercialized by George Westinghouse, who was competing with
the direct current system of Thomas Edison.
One hundred and thirty years later, the grid is still essentially the same, but it is beginning to
transform.

Early on, the grid was simple…
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… but overtime new generation and transmission were added.
But the electricity industry is now facing new challenges…
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The need for a transition to a sustainable society is becoming ever more urgent – sustainable from
the environmental, social and economic perspectives. The productive capacity of the planet is
already stressed in meeting current demand for energy, goods and services, while billions of people
remain mired in poverty, lacking even basic hygiene.
I took this photo in Miur Woods, in California, just North of San Francisco. These redwoods may be a
thousand years old and a hundred meters tall. This is still young for redwoods as they can live up to
2200 years. Being long-lived and large, they play a significant role in the carbon, nutrient, and water
cycles of the forest, helping to support an abundance of plant and animal life. This is a sustainable
ecosystem, although under increasing pressure now, with extreme heat waves, droughts, more
wildland fires, coastal flooding and erosion, and other forms of habitat destruction among possible
scenarios in the coming decades.
Photo Credit: Benoit Marcoux, personal collection, Looking up Miur Woods, California, 2007.
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Resiliency is defined as "the capacity to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent
change" (Joseph Fiksel, Ohio State University, Center for Resilience) – i.e. adaptive capacity.
I took this photo on a beach in Aruba. The famous Divi Divi trees are Aruba's natural compass, always
pointing in a southwesterly direction due to the trade winds that blow across the island. While this
was a nice sunny day, one can imagine that this tree has seen its share of storms and hurricanes, yet
it is resilient and it managed to survive.
For cities, strengthening resilience today is a prerequisite for achieving long-term sustainability in the
future.
Photo Credit: Benoit Marcoux, personal collection, Tree on a beach, Aruba, 2005.
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Example: Assessment of city practices regarding water:
• Bottom-left: Land reclamation: The World Archipelago, Dubai, neither resilient nor sustainable,
especially with rising sea.
Photo Credit: NASA
• Bottom-right: Desalination: resilient,as we will have a lot of sea water, but not sustainable given
the cost of energy.
Photo Credit: Starsend(Photograph) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Top-left: Rainwater harvesting: sustainable as it uses little resources, but not resilient as
susceptible to drought and climate change.
Photo Credit: SuSanA Secretariat (Rain water harvesting Uploaded by Elitre) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via
Wikimedia Commons
• Top-right: Coastal wetlands (mangrove forest): Both resilient as they protect the coast from
erosion and sustainable as they naturally grow and regenerate.
Photo Credit: Benoit Marcoux, personal collection, Mangrove Forest, Martinique, 2014.
The resiliency-sustainability diagram is based on the work of Joseph Fiksel, at the Center for
Resilience, Ohio State University (fiksel.2@osu.edu, 614-226-5678). It was presented to me by a
friend, Jean-François Barsoum, Senior Managing Consultant, Smarter Cities, Water and
Transportation at IBM. Since I focus more on smart electricity, our areas of focus are quite
complementary and we exchange quite a bit on how technology can us help make a more
sustainable world.
It is interesting that city mayors areacknowledged to be at the front line to take us toward a more
resilient and sustainable future.
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Let’s get back to the Resiliency-Sustainability diagram.
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In the 1880s, Nikola Tesla invented the 3-phase, 60 Hz (or 50 Hz) technology that was commercialized
by George Westinghouse, who was then competing with Thomas Edison. The same technology is still
used today. We now want to take it toward a more resilient and sustainable future. As such, we have
been implementing into the electrical grid technologies that render it increasingly resilient and
sustainable.
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(The slide builds up quadrant by quadrant)
Less resilient – less sustainable quadrant
• Traditional grid is primarily powered by central fossil fuel plants, that are neither resilient nor sustainable.
• Surprisingly, even some modern approaches also are in this quadrant:
• Residential PV are typically tripped during an outage (not resilient without storage) and their high cost (when not
subsidized) are not sustainable.
• Cellular networks are also susceptible to outages. Depending on applications, they may contribute to sustainability.
More resilient – less sustainable quadrant
• Diesel generators are the traditional way to have backup power during outages, but not sustainable because they are expensive to
run and use fossil fuel.
• Undergrounding distribution feeders also improve resiliency (Vista switchgear shown).
• More interesting are cogeneration and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants that make better use of residual heat of industrial
processes, sometimes from a renewable source such as wood.
• Meshed field area networks, initially designed for military applications and now being deployed by leading utilities, are more resilient
than cellular networks and, because their applications may help integrate renewables, can improve sustainability (SpeedNet shown).
Less resilient – more sustainable quadrant
• The grid is also powered by large hydro plants and wind farms that are more sustainable but susceptible to transmission problems.
• Smart meters also help promote a more environmentally sustainable future by enabling better control of loads and helping energy
conservation. Although smart meters improve observability of the grid, they do not directly make the grid more resilient, and many
groups of the society opposed them (without scientific reasons).
• Home automation products, like the Nest thermostat, help consumers control and reduce their energy consumption.
More resilient – more sustainable quadrant
• Many smart grid technologies contribute to making the grid both more resilient and more sustainable.
• Remote control of switching devices speed up restoration time and reduce operating costs.
• Advanced protection systems (IntelliRupter and TripSaver II shown) make the grid self-healing, reduce operating costs and help
integrate distributed generation.
• Energy storage systems enable islanding during outages and help smooth out fluctuations in renewable generation.
Credits:
• Co-generation: By D. Sikes (Flickr: 2008-12-27-6533a.jpg) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Nest thermostat: By grantsewell [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b y-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Diesel generator: By Lissia Martinez (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Manic 5: By michelphoto53 (Manicouagan) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licens es/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Solar panel: By Steven Lek (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-s a/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Cell tower: By Tony Webster (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• Tracy plant, M-Series operator, SpeedNet repeater: by Benoit Marcoux, own work.
• Others: Purchased arts, S&C.
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The grid is transforming and getting more complicated.
• We are decommissioning fossil plants toreduce GHG emission and nuclear plants because of safety
concerns.
• There is only so many rivers, so the solution of building new hydro plants is not sufficient.
• We are then replacing fossil and nuclear base load plants with renewables that are intermittent.
• To compound the problem of balancing the grid, loads are also becoming peakier, with reduced load factor.
Interestingly, many energy conservation initiatives actually increase power peaks.
• To connect the new renewable generation, we then need to build more transmission. The transmission
network also allows network operators to spread generation and load over more customers – geographic
spread helps smooth out generation and load.
• Building new transmission lines face local opposition and takes a decade. The only other alternatives to
balance the grid are storage … and Demand Management.
• Another issue is that we are far more dependent on the grid that we used to be. With electrical cars, an
outage during the night may mean that you can’t go to work in the morning. So, we see more and more
attention to resiliency, with faster distribution restoration using networked distribution feeders as well as
microgrids for critical loads during sustained outages.
• Renewable generation and storage can more effectively be distributed to the distribution network,
although small scale generation and storage are much more expansive than community generation and
storage.
• With distributed generation, distributed storage and a networked distribution grid, energy flow on the
distribution grid becomes two-way. This requires additional investments into the distribution grid and a
new attention to electrical protection (remember the screwdriver).
All of this costs money and forces the utilities to adopt new technologies at a pace that has not been seen in a
hundred years. The new technology is expensive, and renewable generation, combined with the cost of
storage, increases energy costs. There is increasing attention to reduction of operating costs and optimization
of assets.
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• Traditional large-scale generator own and maintain coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind and
solar plants connected to transmission lines. Those are large plants - typically hundreds of
megawatts.
• Transmitters own and maintain transmission lines - the large steel towers seen going from large
generators to cities. Those typically run at 120,000 volts and more, up to over 1,000,000 volts in
some cases.
• Distributors own and maintain the local infrastructure of poles and conduits going to customer
sites. Those typically run at 1,200 to 70,000 volts, usually stepped down to 600 volts. 480 volts,
240 volts or 120 volts for connection to customers.
• Most customers are connected to distributors, although some large industrial facilities (such as
aluminum smelters) are directly connected to transmission lines.
• While customers are connected to distributors, they purchase electricity from an independent
retailer or from the retail arm of a distributor.
• With customer installing distributed generation on their premises, they sell back power to the
market, often through aggregators.
• Retailers buy electricity from generators in an energy market - like a stock exchange, but for
electricity.
• By definition, the energy produced at any instant must be equal to the energy taken by customers,
accounting for a small percentage of losses in transmission and distribution. (We are starting to
see large-scale storage operators, which may act as both consumer and generator, depending they
are charging or releasing electricity in the network.) This critical balance is maintained by the
system operator that direct generators to produce more ore less to match load; in some case, the
system operator will also direct distributors to shed load (customers) if generation or transmission
is insufficient to meet the demand.
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• Distributors operate in a defined territory, often corresponding to a city, a state or a province,
where they are the sole provider –thankfully, as there would otherwise be multiple lines of poles
along roads. Retail is often a competitive industry, as there is no structural barrier to having
multiple players.
• It is possible to have multiple transmission companies operating in the same territory, each owing
one or a few transmission lines. System operators are monopolies over a territory, and they have
to maintain independence. They are, in effect, monopolies, although system operators are often
government- or industry-owned. Their costs are recharged to the customer base, directly or
indirectly.
• Large generators are in a competitive business, competing in an open market, although distributed
generators, which are much smaller, usually benefits from rates set by a regulator or a
government.
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Where utilities are allowed to spend money is first and foremost a policy issue – not a regulatory
one, not an operation one. Arguments based on the cost of outages may resonate with policy
makers, including Smart City stakeholders, because of public pressure or impact on the economy at
large. However, these arguments do not resonate with regulatory agents (who follow policies) nor
with utilities (who do not have customer outage costs in their financial statements. Individual users
may or may not know their specific costs related to outages, but broad outage cost assessments will
not affect them.
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Regulated companies look at their business upside-down in comparison to companies operating in a
competitive, free market.
Regulated companies take all their costs (operating expenses, depreciation on assets, taxes, even
allowed return on their investments) and this is deemed equal to the revenues that they are allowed
to recover from their subscribers (clients). This is called revenue requirement or required revenues.
Required revenues are then divided by the energy to be provided (in kWh) to come up with a price
(in ¢/kWh). In practice, different classes of subscribers get different rates, but the total has to be
equal to revenues requirements.
If there is a significant variance between the projected revenues and the actual revenues,
adjustments are made in subsequent years.
Consequences:
• Lowering OpEx means that required revenues will be lowered to compensate, but gross income
remains unaffected.
• New investments mean a larger asset base, on which the shareholders are allowed to claim a
return, meaning that gross income will be higher.
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Carleton University 20160324

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