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Pecan Street To Be Recognized At GridWeek 2012

By Marita Mirzatuny / Published: September 25, 2012

Next week, thousands will descend on Washington DC for GridWeek, the “only international conference focused on smart grid.” Now in its 6th year, GridWeek “attracts the complete diversity of global electric-industry stakeholders to explore Smart Grid’s impact on the economy, utility infrastructure, consumers and the environment.”

The theme for this year is centered on deriving value for all stakeholders from an increased complexity, as “grid-modernization and smart grid efforts provide the energy industry with more information, a broader system view, and more efficiency and control.” Three key elements will be explored: stakeholder value, managing complexity and smart energy policy. EDF Economist Jamie Fine will be speaking on the “New Revenue Streams for Utilities” and “Smart Grid’s Role in New Air Quality Requirements” panel discussions at GridWeek.

At the center of all of these themes is Austin’s own Pecan Street Inc. (Pecan Street). Which is why it is no surprise that it is being recognized by the GridWeek Advisory Board for “significant achievements in “Extracting Smart Grid Value” — for all stakeholders, including utilities, consumers and society at large.” Also recognized are the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) and Green Button, a “voluntary effort and the result of a White House call to action: ‘provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format via a “Green Button” on electric utilities’ website.’”  Read More »

Also posted in Washington, DC / Comments are closed

EDF Energy Innovation Series Feature #11: Battery Switch Model For Electric Vehicles From Better Place

By Jim Marston / Published: September 13, 2012

Throughout 2012, EDF’s Energy Innovation Series will highlight around 20 innovations across a broad range of energy categories, including smart grid and renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency financing, and progressive utilities, to name a few. This series will demonstrate that cost-effective, clean energy solutions are available now and imperative to lowering our dependence on fossil fuels.

For more information on this featured innovation, please view this video on Better Place’s battery switch model for electric vehicles.

When it comes to refueling gas-powered cars, drivers around the world have about 100 years of practice:  when you run low on fuel, you look for a gas station.  With electric vehicles (EVs) beginning to enter the market, auto manufacturers, grid operators and customers are searching for ways to ease the transition from gas to electricity.

Better Place, a venture-backed company founded in Silicon Valley, is building charging stations in several countries to serve EV customers, and has designed an innovative approach that may well become the “gas station” of the future.  Rather than refill your battery, Better Place’s automated service stations swap it out.

Better Place’s battery switch stations – which could be described as a mixture of a drive-through car wash and a Jiffy Lube service station – can extract and replace an electric car’s battery in a matter of minutes, without requiring the driver to get out of the car.  To complement the switch stations, Better Place also builds a network of standard charging stations to regularly “top off” the battery when the car is parked.

Source: Better Place

“The switching concept makes sense for several reasons,” said John Proctor, Director of Global communications at Better Place.  “Battery switch enables us to address the relatively high cost and limited driving range of EVs.  Better Place buys the battery, removing that burden and worry for drivers, and enables them to quickly switch a battery for a fully charged one to overcome concerns about EVs having enough charge for longer trips.”

Some plug-in models, like the Chevy Volt, have gas powered range extenders that give the car the per-charge range of most gas-powered cars.  But many models are powered purely by electricity.  Enabling those cars to compete with comparable gas-powered models on cost and convenience is the aim of Better Place around the globe. Read More »

Also posted in California, Electric Vehicles, Energy Innovation / Tagged | Read 2 Responses

Future Energy – Needed Now

By EDF Blogs / Published: August 8, 2012

By: Richie Ahuja, Regional Director, Asia, and Andy Darrell, New York Regional Director and Deputy Director of the Energy Program

Credit: Parivartan Sharma / Reuters

“Leopards and elephants often wander in…”says the manager of a tea plantation in India, left in the dark without electricity after the near total collapse of India’s electric grid.  Trains stopped, miners were stuck underground, traffic lights went out, and homes and businesses were left without electricity.  It was the world’s largest blackout, affecting more than 600 million people.

The truth is, the electric grid in many parts of the world is fragile, often struggling to match supply and demand.   The United States is no stranger to blackouts either, as the Washington post reports. “My house lost power for four days,” notes a fellow EDF’er living in Washington, DC in regards to an outage earlier this July. 

Yet technology is available to make grids much more resilient, nimble — and climate friendly.  From sensors that identify weak spots in advance, to ways to store wind power in electric cars overnight, and buildings that make money by selling “negawatts” into the grid at peak times, we know how to get this right.

Globally, trillions of dollars are poised to be invested into electricity systems in developed and developing countries.  Surprisingly, a lot of the medicine to cure the grid is remarkably similar across the world – deploy sensors that gather data that can be used for both reliability and pollution reduction, make it easy to plug renewables into the network, and reward efficiency and demand response.  Build a data-driven, flexible network that uses technology to harness the power of information.

What’s holding us back is not technology or the will to innovate:  it is outdated regulation and policy.  Like most markets, the electricity market is governed by many rules – rules that frame what’s welcome to enter the market, access to data, how much any of us can make by putting solar panels on our house, etc. With so much investment about to happen, isn’t it time we took a hard look at those rules, to make sure we end up with a network that welcomes the future and rewards reliable, clean energy?

Austin’s Pecan Street project  is pioneering a new way of doing business, one that works for families, for businesses, for people – and the planet.  EDF is taking what we learned from that project and developing ideas for how to open much larger markets to innovation, like California and parts of the Midwest.

Leopards and elephants seem a long way away from our homes here in the U.S.… but reading about this crisis in India makes us realize how related the solutions to our energy futures really are.  And how important it is, in each country, to get it right.

Posted in Grid Modernization / Comments are closed

Saving Energy One Crab At A Time

By Greg Andeck / Published: August 2, 2012

Imagine the embarrassment of leaving your office lights turned on and returning to find a giant fiddler crab sitting on your desk.  This fishy situation is happening in office buildings all across Charlotte, North Carolina –the crabs are plastic, and the fiddler variety is used for their notorious attraction to light.  It is all part of a fun, social experiment happening in uptown Charlotte office buildings to remind employees to shut of their lights when leaving the office and power down their computers when headed home.  If employees leave their lights on, coworkers will place crabs in the offending employee’s office to remind them to turn off their lights. In order to rid themselves of the burdensome crab, that employee must covertly “tag” another absent minded coworker by leaving a crab on their desk – all in the name of energy efficiency.  

And the amazing thing is that the playful reminder works!  After “Crab, You’re It!” was introduced in one of Mecklenburg County’s office buildings, 26% more lights were turned off when not in use, leading to significant energy savings.  

The “Crab, You’re It!” game – now adopted as part of the Envision Charlotte project – is just one of several innovative employee behavior change experiments that are leading to real energy reductions in office buildings in this entrepreneurial North Carolina city.  The creators of the game – the County of Mecklenburg staff – knew that most office employees are not motivated to save energy solely out of the goodness of their heart.  We are all busy and saving energy in the office is not always top of mind.  The key was to find a way for employees to actually get excited and have fun while saving energy.  And, let’s be honest.  Nobody wants to be crabbed.

Also posted in North Carolina / Tagged | Read 1 Response

Envision Charlotte Meets Pecan Street

By Greg Andeck / Published: July 26, 2012

Last week, I, along with several other Envision Charlotte Board Members travelled to visit the Pecan Street smart grid project in Austin, Texas.   We hope this will be the start of a recurring “exchange program” between the two cities for sharing of information and best practices related to smart grid deployment.  There are significant differences between the two projects.  Pecan Street is focused on the residential sector; Envision Charlotte on commercial office buildings.  Envision Charlotte is deploying innovative behavior change, social networking and employee training to reduce energy use, while Pecan Street is heavily focused on technology solutions. 

But, there is also a lot in common.  Both organizations desire to reduce energy use and find alternatives to our outdated energy system.  Both believe that smart grids and energy efficiency can be cost effective and drive economic development.  Finally, both groups are rigorously measuring the impacts of their actions. 

What we saw in Austin was very cool.  We started by visiting a home in the Mueller neighborhood, a playground for testing the latest in home energy management and appliances.  In one house’s garage was a wireless energy monitor that connects to the home’s circuit breaker box and allows homeowners to view real time energy use from different appliances and lighting systems in the home.  Residents now know exactly how much it is costing them to make coffee each morning – or power up their flat screen TV. 

Also in the garage was a Chevy Volt, along with four charging stations from different manufacturers (according to Pecan Street staff, they all perform roughly the same).  Up on the roof was a series of solar panels, whose every watt is being recorded to learn important things about installation location, potential for offsetting peak generation, and storage solutions.  Although each of these technologies are impressive on their own, only when operating together do they represent the next generation of home energy management where consumers have complete knowledge and control over their energy choices.  It’s pretty empowering.

This innovative project didn’t happen accidentally.  It came about through lots of perspiration from their Executive Director and former Austin Council Member Brewster McCracken; design recommendations from hundreds of folks in the private sector, local community and NGOs (including EDF); prodigious fundraising; and hard work from staff, board members, and participating companies.  Some of my key takeaways from the trip are as follows:

Residential Technology Still a Wild West – Unlike the commercial building automation universe, where users have more experience integrating energy management and building systems to speak the same code and talk to one another, residential systems are still in their infancy and competing languages make it extremely difficult to get different pieces of hardware to talk to one another.  Pecan Street will often need to write new code or develop other workarounds to get vendor equipment to work as described.  This is one of the reasons why EDF has joined the OPEN network, to help ensure that smart grid investments in different states maximize interoperability.

The Incredible Power of Data – Pecan Street collects a data point from each home circuit every 15 seconds.  With dozens of circuits per home and hundreds of participating homes in the Mueller development, the Pecan Street project has rapidly approached billions of discrete pieces of data that can be captured, sorted and analyzed.  Although a challenge to work with data sets this large, once properly harnessed, they provide incredible insights to consumers, utilities, researchers and policymakers on energy use.  Pecan Street can see exactly what happens to the grid when someone opens their refrigerator or micro-waves dinner, and use that information to develop strategies for homeowners that will reduce energy use and improve reliability.   

Test Technology, Scale, Inform Policy – Pecan Street is unique in its approach in several ways, but one of the most significant is that it enables a technology to policy pathway.  Pecan Street’s test labs experiment with the latest in home energy management technologies, present those solutions to homeowners in the Mueller neighborhood for adoption and enable EDF to identify regulatory or policy mechanisms that can further accelerate smart grid investment.  As an example, last year EDF was able to help secure provisions in a Texas energy bill that enable demand response programs and payments for utility customers.  This technology to policy approach is something that Envision Charlotte will need to reach our ambitious 5-year, 20% energy reduction goal.

All in all, it was an incredible trip.  Over the coming years, as Envision Charlotte develops more programs and scales its impact, we hope to repay the warm hospitality of Pecan Street by hosting their team in Charlotte and sharing what we have learned.  We’ll promise good conversation, great BBQ and a continued devotion to collaboration.

Also posted in North Carolina, Texas / Tagged , | Comments are closed

Smart Meters Are Key To A Smart Grid

By Cassandra Ely / Published: July 26, 2012

Cassandra Brunette is a research associate in EDF’s Office of Chief Scientist.

Source: PG&E

A well-designed smart grid is critical to the clean energy revolution we need – enabling significantly greater use of clean, renewable, domestic energy resources and improved air quality to protect the health of millions of Americans now harmed by dangerous air pollution.

Smart meters are a key component of the smart grid.  They unlock air quality, climate pollution and public health benefits by enabling two-way, real-time communication that gives households, small businesses, manufacturers and farmers (and the utilities that serve them) the information they need to cut energy use and electricity costs.  These devices help ensure that every day energy users reap the many benefits of the smart grid.

However, as a recent PBS NewsHour report explained, some activist groups and individuals in areas where smart meters have been deployed have expressed concerns over exposure to radio frequencies (RFs) resulting from the use  of this technology.  EDF supports further research and opt-out programs for those concerned.  But what is missing from the PBS report is a clear account of the current, available scientific evidence on smart meters and health.  EDF uses the best available science in all of its programs, and our smart grid initiative is no exception.

I am a member of EDF’s science team out of the San Francisco Bay Area and have dug deep into the peer-reviewed literature on health effects of smart meters, as well as independent assessments by agencies and industry groups and reports from government agencies.  Here is what we know:

Research shows that every day humans come into contact with RFs from a wide variety of sources, including – but not limited to – wireless or cellular phones, microwaves, wireless internet routers, hair dryers, baby monitors and wireless laptops.  Each has varying levels of exposure that depend on the technology and – importantly – on distance from the source.

One example in our daily lives is the use of a cell phone.  A study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) found that during a call, cell phones held at the ear generate exposure levels between 1000-5000 microwatts per square centimeter (µW/cm2).  In comparison, when transmitting, smart meters create exposure levels of approximately 8.8 µW/cm2.  And that’s if a person is standing right in front of the meter.  In homes and businesses, people are much farther away from their electric meter, so exposure levels are far lower.  This means that a cell phone call exposes a person to hundreds of times more RFs than a transmitting smart meter.  Moreover, smart meters only transmit signals roughly 2-5% of the day (approximately 30-70 minutes).

Source: CCST

The chart to the right (units in µW/cm2), from a report by the California Council on Science and Technology, puts smart meters in context with other RF emitting technologies.  Keep in mind that this chart compares smart meters at a hypothetical maximum exposure level with transmission occurring during 100% of the day.  Even at these hypothetical maximums, exposure from smart meters is significantly lower than other technologies already in use.

Assessments also show that impacts from RFs come in two forms, thermal (heat-related) and non-thermal.  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sets safety standards for thermal impacts.  Smart meter exposure levels fall well below the FCC’s limits for safety for thermal impacts.  As for non-thermal impacts, the cumulative impacts of low-dose, long-term exposure are uncertain.  To date, there is no scientific evidence of non-thermal impacts from smart meter RF emissions.  EDF supports continued research on any possible health impacts of all RF emitters, but given the current standard for thermal impacts and uncertainties of non-thermal impacts, there is no evidence that the public would benefit from additional standards.

EDF’s number one priority is environmental and public health safety.  We advocate for a “smart grid done right” to quote a message by EDF’s President Fred Krupp, and we are not alone in this effort.  Though the PBS NewsHour story references “environmentalists” broadly opposed to a smarter grid, EDF is one of many environmental organizations strongly advocating for grid modernization as the clear path to lessening our dependence on fossil fuels and moving us toward a clean, healthy, low-carbon energy system.  Our science team will continue thorough assessments of the best available science on this topic and our work with utilities, regulators and the smart grid industry to protect the environment and the health of customers.

For more information on the many benefits of the smart grid, please view EDF’s fact sheet here.

Posted in Grid Modernization / Tagged | Read 14 Responses