At the MIT Technology Review, Kevin Bullis brings the good news that Florida Power & Light has completed and is now operating the first large scale, comprehensive smart grid. The $800 million dollar private-public project was built with $200 million from the U.S. Department of Energy made available through the Recovery Act.
Here is President Obama announcing the project in 2009:
Smart grids should be far more resilient than conventional grids, which is important for surviving storms, and make it easier to install more intermittent sources of energy like solar power.
Many utilities are installing smart meters—Pacific Gas & Electric in California has installed twice as many as FPL, for example. But while these are important, the flexibility and resilience that the smart grid promises depends on networking those together with thousands of sensors at key points in the grid— substations, transformers, local distribution lines, and high voltage transmission lines. (A project in Houston is similar in scope, but involves half as many customers, and covers somewhat less of the grid.)
In FPL’s system, devices at all of these places are networked—data jumps from device to device until it reaches a router that sends it back to the utility—and that makes it possible to sense problems before they cause an outage, and to limit the extent and duration of outages that still occur ..... The project involved 4.5 million smart meters and over 10,000 other devices on the grid.
The project was completed just last week, so data about the impact of the whole system isn’t available yet. But parts of the smart grid have been operating for a year or more, and there are examples of improved operation. Customers can track their energy usage by the hour using a website that organizes data from smart meters. This helped one customer identify a problem with his air conditioner, says Bryan Olnick, vice president of smart grid solutions at Florida Power & Light, when he saw a jump in electricity consumption compared to the previous year in similar weather.
Smart grids will be part of solution to keeping the lights on as we enter the climate change era of more intense and frequent
extreme weather.