Archive: Around Town

	NYSEG is launching the Energy Smart Community in large portions of Lansing, Dryden and Ithaca.  Last week we took a look at an energy future for consumers that will be up and running in Tompkins County this summer.  This week we look at how the upgrades will facilitate alternative power sources like solar and wind power generation.

Power is generated at a big plant somewhere.  It is hooked up to a grid of wires with various switches and devices to provide an even flow of electricity, which goes through a meter and into your house so when you flip a switch in the wall, a light turns on.  All you have to care about it the switch and the light.  But a move away from centralized power plants to electricity generating facilities that can be as small as a solar panel or two on your roof, coupled with the high price of energy means change from that one way system -- power plant to grid to house -- will have to morph into a system that can accept power from just about anywhere, use it locally or push it back into the grid, plus provide data to help manage the flow that is now coming from multiple sources including solar panels, wind generators and batteries.

"We now have to plan for both load in a very different world, and we also need to provide information back out to the market on 'hosting capascity: based on how the grid is configured, where are good places to put more larger scale solar (not residential level - 2MW and above)," says Avangrid (NYSEG's parent company) spokeswoman Susan Mann.  "The grid wasn't designed to handle this.  It wasn't designed to handle two-way power flows, these fluctuations that are now happening as solar comes on and off, depending on the clouds moving over an area -- all the power quality issues that raises.  And yet it's an imperative.  New York State has got some very clear policy goals around trying to decarbonize our energy infrastructure."

This summer Tompkins County becomes a test bed for the Energy Smart Community.  NYSEG customers in the northeastern portion of the county will be the first to experience this future.  The local distribution grid will become a sort of Internet of Electricity, transforming from a one way power delivery system to one that can handle multiple devices on both the power generating and receiving sides.

"Since the launch of the project, NYSEG has reviewed municipal master plans to identify community energy goals across Tompkins County and has conducted over forty meetings with relevant stakeholders to gather input about project offerings and design," reads Distributed System Implementation Plan (DSIP) NYSEG filed June 30th with the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC).  "The project team has evaluated various options for online platforms and formed a community advisory board with members representing municipalities, local organizations and engaged citizens."

Mann says Tompkins County is the perfect community to launch the 11 projects that comprise the Energy Smart Community.  The county offers an engaged, activist, forward looking population and one of the top research universities in the world, plus a county government that has developed its own energy goals and strategies.

"This is a community that we saw could be receptive to this," she says.  "So the concept of the Energy Smart Community was born.  They wanted to work with us.  It's a collaborative partnership with the utility making investments to upgrade the grid and put in the new technologies and platforms that service both the grid and customers.  The community then continues to use those technologies and platforms so that they can develop and continue to iterate off their own energy goals and develop their own road map.  They will have more information and data available to them."

The end result will be some nifty technologies that will have the potential to reduce the high cost of peak power production for the electric company, while potentially lowering customers' energy costs at the same time.  Producing accurate hourly data on electricity usage and providing analytic tools to the company and its customers will create a kind of energy-smart collaboration that will make it possible to attain those goals.  But changes to the current grid technology and integration with other technologies, including some that are still in the development phase, will be needed before this can happen.

Changes are being made to 15 grid circuits and four local substations in Lansing and Ithaca.  Sensors and other devices are being installed so NYSEG can monitor power flow and usage at the substation and circuit level.  This spring the company will replace old electric meters with 12,400 'smart meters' divided about equally among Lansing and Dryden customers, with a small piece of Ithaca and the villages of Lansing and Cayuga Heights included.  These meters are able to transfer accurate and timely data to NYSEG via radio waves that will eliminate human meter reading (and errors in the readings), and the software in the meters can be upgraded over the air, much as the radio transmitters in the county-wide wifi project are.  By summer the company will be sharing this data with customers so they can see when they use electricity the most, and use the data to decide when best to use electricity based on non-peak, less expensive times of day.

"We use an information management system at the transmission level to manage the transmission grid.  We're bringing that software down to the distribution level," Mann explains.  "Then we're marrying this with an Advanced Distribution Management System, which is a piece of software that runs the grid.  When you have all this distributed generation you have a lot more fluctuation in the system.  It takes in all this information and is able to make the decision in real time to keep the power flow and the power quality and the voltages at acceptable levels.  Think of rooftop solar and community solar.  But it's not just solar - it's smaller scale wind; it will be battery storage; it's energy efficiency demand/response."

This new approach to energy flow and usage will not only impact end-users, but is intended to benefit developers as well.  The Lansing School District has been experiencing a major issue that the flow of Energy Smart Community information is intended to solve.  The school district has been attempting to enter into an agreement with a company that wants to build a 1.5MW solar array that it would sell back to NYSEG, passing on savings to the schools that could amount to about a half million dollars over 25 years.  Coming to an agreement has been a bumpy road over three years, with rising prices and issues of liability among the bumps.

But one of the biggest bumps was the location of the array.  Originally a piece of land owned by the Cayuga Power Plant near Lansing's northern border was considered, but it turned out it would have been too expensive to get the electricity from that northern Lansing location to the power grid, and the cost of an access road would have made it still more expensive.  The developers also looked at property closer to the schools owned by the Cargill salt mine.  But the issue isn't so much how close the array is to the schools -- after all, the plan is to simply put the power into the grid and the actual savings are more of a monetary equation than an actual hookup -- the issue is how best to get the power into the grid.  They finally found a plot of land owned by Hardie Farm that fits the bill.  If all the other issues can be resolved before grant money disappears at the end of this year (and if the Board Of Education decides the contract is in the district's best long-term  interests) that is where the array will go.

Mann says that while upgrades will make it possible for power to enter into many more points in the grid, the current system is obviously not being ripped out and replaced, so some locations are more advantageous for developers of large solar arrays, wind farms, or hydroelectric, and other generating facilities.  Data gleaned from smart meters and sensors at the grid level will provide a sort of map for developers that identifies ideal spots to hook into the grid.

"That information will then be pushed out to a portal where town and regional planners and developers, particularly solar but not exclusively, can come and see this information and use that to inform their planning and investment  decisions," she says.  "Developers want to know where they should be looking to site the larger solar farms, etc.  This is a tool for them to help guide them -- they might have a location but it's not a good location for the grid in terms of what it will trip at the substation in terms of requiring some sort of substation upgrade.  If they can locate that generation someplace else where it has greater benefits to the grid as a whole and reduces the costs, that's a win for everybody.  That's why this information is so important."

By fall, residential customers will have access to an 'energy manager', a Web portal that will provide information on their own electricity usage and see what time of day the rates are most advantageous on an hour to hour, day to day basis.  That is important, because rates will be highest at peak times, such as a particularly hot day when many customers crank up their air conditioners.

"That will come in the fall in around August or September," Mann says.  "There is a lot of back-end integration we have to do to stitch this all together and make all the information flow so that it's meaningful and useful to customers."

Meanwhile she notes that Cornell is working on battery units that will be capable of storing power at the less expensive times of day to be used at the lower rate during peak hours.

"They are figuring out how in this smart grid-enabled world do we take advantage of stitching all of these things together," Mann says.  "When Cornell has worked through that it could be a program that customers can sign up for and we'll be able to test it out in real time.  That offers Cornell a real live working test bed.  They start off with lab simulations, but then they get real field data.  It's a really great way to test this out in a very low cost, risk-managed way before we try to replicate this to a million customers."

That is the ultimate goal.  The lessons learned in Tompkins County will eventually be implemented across Avangrid's customer base across the country.  The local program is part of the company's three to five year road map outlined in its 242 page DSIP.

"The Companies will continue to own and operate the transmission and distribution (“T&D”) network (including meters)," the plan says. "We will continue to maintain our existing infrastructure and add new infrastructure while connecting, integrating and coordinating distributed energy resources (“DER”). Our relationships with DER providers and other third-party vendors will expand to include transactions in which the DSPP is a seller, buyer, and/or partner. The DSPP (Distributed System Platform Provider) will perform three core functions: 'Grid Operations' (operating a complex power grid), 'Integrated System Planning' (planning that leverages DER as a potential resource to solve traditional network challenges, and providing information to our customers and DER providers that supports their decision-making), and “Market Enablement” (engaging customers and third parties in market opportunities)."

That makes NYSEG customer in the towns of Lansing, Dryden and Ithaca pioneers in the next phase of electricity consumers.  The future of power generation, distribution, and use is here, and we will be the first to participate in it fully by this fall.

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