The world’s first fully integrated smart electrical grid will be completed in Boulder, Colorado, by mid-2009, according to XCEL Energy, a utility serving eight states. In this trial, costing up to $100 million, XCEL and its partners plan a grid able to predict and prevent many outages, route power around outages, communicate with smart appliances and thermostats to avoid overloads and peak costs, give customers real-time pricing so they can move off-peak if they choose, optimize power sources to a customer’s preferences (least cost, cleanest, or a mix) and integrate plug-in electric hybrids as potential backup generators or battery storage available to the grid.
That’s a partial list.
The ultimate goal is integrating everything from source to delivery to customer interaction through a communications web smart enough to make many of its own decisions. The system will also provide a clearer view than ever before into usage patterns, allowing increasing optimization. The result is expected to be much greater energy efficiency, a greatly reduced carbon footprint, more customer control, lower operating and investment costs for the utility, and more options for products it can offer the customer. The second half of 2009 is an evaluation period, and the results will be eagerly awaited.
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