Great River Energy, two co-ops to test smart grid technologies ...

Posted: 4:11 pm Mon, May 14, 2012
By Frank?Jossi
Tags: Great River Energy, Lake Region Electric Cooperative, Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, smart grid

Great River Energy, which has its headquarters in Maple Grove, is part of the smart grid demonstration project. (Submitted photo: Great River Energy)

A smarter electrical grid is coming to rural Minnesota that may someday allow homeowners to power down air conditioners or space heaters through their smartphones.

That?s part of the promise of a new $5 million smart grid demonstration project that will be shared by Maple Grove-based Great River Energy, Pelican Rapids-based Lake Region Electric Cooperative and the Jordan-based Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative. Half the grant came from a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant and the rest from the participants.

Gary Connett, Great River Energy?s director of member services and demand-side management, said the grant will help to develop a grid that can be more finely managed based on more sophisticated data gathered by utilities.

Customers ?get one point of information every month? in the form of a bill, Connett said. ?The industry is going toward the notion that more information will make you a better, more informed consumer,? he said.

The four-year project is coordinated by the Arlington, Va.-based National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which has received a $34 million matching grant from DOE to evaluate smart grid technologies. The Minnesota project comes out of the association?s matching grant.

Patricia Hoffman, a DOE assistant secretary focused on electricity delivery, said the grant is part of a $4.5 billion grid modernization program. The money, she said, is being used to install smart grid technology, train people for utility jobs and develop industry standards.

The pilot projects play out with different aims depending on where utilities are located. Tennessee utilities, for example, focused on reducing down times. In Minnesota energy storage will be tested within the parameters of the grant, Hoffman said.

?Not every vision for grid modernization in different parts of the country is the same,? she said. ?But these pilots are giving us a vision of where we?re heading in terms of smart grid.?

The smart grid effort is expected to take advantage of new appliances that can now be remotely controlled by users or by utilities ? with a customer?s approval. A utility could send a ?price signal from a utility? to homeowners to power down certain appliances in return for a price break, Connett said.

Or homeowners could have the utility manage their electricity based on their usage patterns. ?A smart grid allows us to do smart pricing,? he said.

But the smart grid need not always focus on more sophisticated applications. For years, Great River Energy has offered a price break to more than 68,000 consumers who have super-insulated water heaters with 85- to 105-gallon capacities, Connett said. A third-party vendor sells the water heaters to Great River Energy?s customers.

From 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. the utility heats the tanks even though they are not in use. By the time electricity to the tank goes off, a homeowner will have enough hot water for an entire day ? from showering to running a dishwasher, he said.

The strategy captures energy from electricity generated by wind farms that sell power to the utility, he said. Wind energy is greatest at night, and storing the electricity is an issue because energy needs are greatest during the day.

?It?s a smart thing to do for businesses and our members, and it?s what they expect from us,? Connett said.

Electric cooperatives have led the country in installing smart grid applications because their dispersed members make it difficult for utilities to easily capture data on energy use, said Great River Energy spokesman Randy Fordice, project communications specialist.

Many rural utilities already have implemented smart meters and smart grid strategies to improve billing and service and to reduce their need to build new power plants, he said. The grant will help co-ops continue to build a framework for ?demand response management? to allow more two-way communication with customers who could, for instance, accept a financial incentive for agreeing to power down their air conditioners on a hot day, he said.

The grant, said Fordice, will develop residential and commercial storage for renewable energy sources and offer homeowners a display that shows the wholesale price of electricity. Utilities think that visualization of data could change consumer behavior.

Great River Energy, a nonprofit, distributes electricity to 28 member cooperatives representing 1.7 million people. It will spend a total of $1.6 million on the project. Minnesota Valley, which serves 35,000 people in nine counties, will spend $3.1 million, much of it on hardware and software purchases. Its service area includes the counties of Blue Earth, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Le Sueur, Rice, Scott, Sibley and Waseca.

The Lake Region Electric Cooperative will spend $370,000 to improve management of its sparsely populated service area, where more than a third of the residents live there six months a year or less.

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