Photo: William Sweet

Wished-for Thinking

Designers of SmartGridCity hope that when consumers are shown how they are using their electricity on an Internet-based home portal like this one, there will be a “demand response.”  

Though its ambitions are lofty and it is one of a kind, SmartGridCity is a rather small project and is still in a rather tentative stage of development. Only about half the relevant equipment has been installed to date, and fully interactive technology is fully operational at just a handful of consumer locations. Tangible results worth reporting to the general public and to local regulators will start materializing only toward the end of this year, at the earliest. Were it not for the pioneering character of the project and the very big impact it could end up having—or not!—the project might be deemed overhyped and overcovered. A really cantankerous curmudgeon might even call it a stacked test, based on an unrepresentative sample and therefore destined to produce unconvincing results.

Xcel picked Boulder precisely because it’s not your typical American town. Situated less than an hour northwest of Denver, right where the Plains meet the foothills of the Rockies, it hosts the University of Colorado and a large, somewhat floating population long known for its New Age and slightly left-leaning inclinations. It’s the home of Celestial Seasonings, the purveyor of natural herb concoctions and is the only community in the United States so far to have enacted its own carbon tax. Not infrequently, Boulder is compared with the California city sometimes called the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

Xcel liked Boulder because it happened to be part of its Colorado operating area, because of its sharp physical definition, and because of its environmentally minded citizenry. If anybody is going to put interactive electrical devices to good use, the energy company figured, it ought to be Boulderites just being themselves. A concern, joked company executive Raymond Gogel during a media briefing last year, was that some of them might fear being caught by smart sensors growing marijuana under intense basement lights. But Xcel didn’t worry much about whether Boulder’s civic-spirited citizens would be willing, for example, to let their utility directly turn down their air conditioners when summer demand is too high and threatens to bring down the grid.

Pervasive communication and quick response are at the heart of the smart grid concept. Most of the smart meters that Xcel has been placing in Boulder homes communicate to the utility via broadband over power lines (BPL) and a fiber-optic communications system the company maintains; typically, BPL will carry the data the first 75 meters or so from the smart meter out to where it meets up with a fiber link. Information the utility compiles from each residence is communicated back to the user over the Internet.

Demonstration homes, including the chancellor’s residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder, are equipped with computer-based “home portals” where residents can scan historical usage and make decisions about how to manage present-day and future electricity usage. A variety of plug adapters permit the conversion of any major appliance into a smart device. The city of Boulder and the University of Colorado are participating in an experiment involving 60 plug-in electric cars, which will be chargeable at stations to be established around town.

The ultimate hope or fantasy is that hybrids—in addition to drawing on electricity—will also serve as home energy storage devices that can contribute power at times of system overload. That way, the hybrid car, in combination with scattered home generation from photovoltaic panels or even personal windmills, can help make the whole system more secure and more economical. At times of high general demand, homes can contribute generation to the grid, but when electricity is plentiful and cheap, homes can draw power to charge up their cars and run major appliances.

The only residential installation in Boulder that comes close at present to realizing all those possibilities is the chancellor’s residence. It’s divided into a number of electricity zones, enabling the residents to see in some detail where and how they’re drawing the most power. It has a plug-in hybrid in the garage and a 6-kilowatt solar panel on the roof.

Ultimately, in theory, a customer equipped with all those things and a home portal to regulate their use will be able to determine, whether at home, at work, or on vacation, just how the home electricity system should be configured.