Avista's Pullman Smart Grid Demonstration Project
By Heather Rosentrater, Director of Asset Management and Process Improvement, Avista and Narasimha Chari, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Tropos Networks With the implementation of its Pullman, Wash., Smart Grid Demonstration Project, Avista stands at the forefront of comprehensive smart grid deployment. The project aims to modernize much of Avista's Pullman electric distribution system using intelligent devices and two-way communication. As part of the project, Avista is installing a wide-area private wireless broadband network as its communications infrastructure. In addition to distribution automation, the project encompasses advanced metering infrastructure and a customer pilot that will provide customers in-home energy consumption data, establish and test regional demand response signals and help the utility understand customer experience, satisfaction, and program participation. The project's goals are to understand the value smart grid technologies can bring to Avista and its customers, as well as the costs of providing those benefits, so that the utility can better analyze costs and benefits of various smart grid applications. In addition to understanding the viability of each service used in the project, Avista seeks to understand how to best expand successful smart grid applications to the rest of the company's customers. Avista is an investor-owned utility headquartered in Spokane, Wash. The company provides electricity to about 357,000 customers and natural gas to 317,000 customers. Its service territory spans approximately 30,000 square miles in eastern Washington, northern Idaho and parts of southern and eastern Oregon.Avista's Pullman Smart Grid Demonstration Project
is part of the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, a project led by Battelle under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The project involves 11 utilities, the Bonneville Power Administration, along with the University of Washington, Washington State University, and five technology partners. The project has a budget of $178 million split between the DOE and project participants. The project aims to verify the viability of smart grid technology and quantify smart grid costs and benefits. Under this umbrella, Avista is implementing the Pullman Smart Grid Demonstration Project in cooperation with local cost share partners Itron, Washington State University (WSU), Hewlett Packard and Spirae. The total cost of the project is expected to be $38 million. Avista is contributing $14.9 million, Avista's cost share partners an aggregate of $4 million and the DOE is supplying a matching grant of $19 million. Other partners include vendors and contractors such as Scope, Efacec Advanced Control Systems and Schweitzer Engineering Labs. Avista selected Pullman for the Smart Grid Demons tration Project because it is the right size and offers a good mix of industrial, commercial and residential customers. Pullman is also the home of WSU, with its acclaimed Power Engineering program. WSU's current research areas include smart home, wind integration, electrical grid security and electric grid stability. The city is also home to Schweitzer Engineering Labs, a leading vendor of protective equipment. An important aspect of Schweitzer's and WSU's participation is that both have small scale electric generation capability, critical for testing distributed generation integration and net metering. Avista's goals for the Pullman Smart Grid Demonstration Project are to demonstrate and evaluate smart grid applications and technologies; show how the electric grid can react to sudden changes in power supply and demand; and help prepare Avista and its customers for the modernization of the electrical grid. The company will meet these goals by: * Upgrading electrical facilities and automating the electrical distribution grid to support intelligent devices and two-way communication between the utility and all parts of the system. * Demonstrating technologies and tools, including advanced metering, in-home devices and web tools, to understand ways to enable customers to actively monitor and better manage their energy usage. Potential benefits of the project include: * Less waste from lost power as it moves through the transmission and distribution system helps Avista reduce operating costs and conserves power to help meet demand. * Distribution technology can automatically detect and isolate an outage, saving time and reducing outage frequency and length for customers. * Partnering with customers to provide them with better information about their energy usage gives customers tools to use energy more efficiently.Distribution Automation
Recently, advances in communication technologies have enabled the smart grid vision of distribution automation. Devices such as capacitor banks, switches, reclosers, sectionalizers and transformers can be actively monitored and operated remotely from substations and in utilities' data centers. ElectricEnergy T&D MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2011 Issue 13
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