Smart meters and time-of-use pricing are always well-read stories because there’s true division within the general public on whether smart meters are consumer-friendly gadgets that encourage conservation or utility-friendly devices that make it easier to gouge consumers. See my story in the Toronto Star from Friday. My take is that electricity prices are going up whether we get smart meters or not, and that smart meters — and the applications they enable — offer households a way to shift and even lower their electricity use to buffer the impact of rising prices. The mistake — and again, just my view — is that smart meters have been improperly marketed to consumers as some kind of sexy wonder tool that will help them lower their bills. Instead, utilities should have downplayed the introduction and simply moved ahead with their installation as part of a less exciting grid modernization play — equivalent to a telecom company upgrading from analog to digital networks so that, down the road, new services can be offered to customers. Customers don’t care about the bandwidth, they just care about the handsets and what they can do.

By positioning smart meters as more of an infrastructure play the cost of deployment can be simply incorporated into annual capital budgets and households are more resigned to the fact that getting the new device is mandatory. Let’s face it, initially smart meters are about helping utilities manage their networks better — i.e. they can pinpoint problems and do more detailed analysis of individual household, neighbourhood, and community power consumption, improving system planning and maintenance operations and preparing utilities for increased distributed generation in their service territories.

By making this seem like some gift to consumers, as has been done, utilities open themselves up to consumers expecting certain results and wanting the option of getting or not getting the smart meter. (more…)

Just days before the Ontario government is expected to officially launch its much-anticipated feed-in tariff program (FIT), Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman announced that the province — through crown-owned utility Hydro One — will spend $2.3 billion on 20 projects designed to expand and upgrade its transmission system. The investment is expected to take place over three years and create 20,000 “green-collar” jobs in the process. Many of the projects are aimed at expanding capacity along existing corridors to carry more power from the Far North where there remains an abundance of untapped wind and hydroelectric projects. But some of the money will also go toward constructing enabler lines for areas of the province where renewable-energy development clusters have been identified. It’s being called an historic investment in transmission, the largest single commitment in decades, and the government said it was important to make this commitment to signal to the market that Ontario is serious about accommodating development of green-energy projects. Indeed, it’s a wise investment to announce just before the launch of the FIT program, and just after announcing a $250-million loan guarantee program dedicated to aboriginal-owned renewable generation and transmission projects.

A description of each projects can be found here. The province has also supplied a map showing where existing lines will be reinforced and where enabler lines will be built.

My Clean Break column yesterday takes a look at an overlooked issue on the smart-grid file: privacy and security. Last week Toronto Hydro disclosed that 179,000 customer online accounts had been illegally accessed, along with some personal information. Now, this could have happened to any Web site that gives online access to billing — retailers, banks, your phone or cable company — so this isn’t directly a “smart grid” issue. What it highlights, however, is that utilities are a target like anyone else, and could increasingly be a target as they deploy smart meters and begin to offer energy-management services through the Web. How much energy we use at various times of the day can, surprisingly, say a lot about you and your home. For one, it can tell someone you’re not home. And it can allow someone to track your activities throughout the day. As I point out in the column, the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week showed just how easy it can be to remotely infiltrate a network of smart meters and seize control. Of course, we also have to worry about the upstream as well, keeping security issues top of mind  as we modernize our transmission systems. This is critical infrastructure, and with more and more points of access being created to enable the “smart grid,” this infrastructure will be increasingly vulnerable to attack.

I’ll have more to say on this acquisition in a few days, but wanted to draw attention to GridPoint’s purchase of Lixar SRS, a scrappy but secretive energy management startup in Ottawa/Toronto that within the utility sector has attracted a lot of well-deserved attention. GridPoint, which has raised more than $200 million in venture capital, has been using that money to bolster its smart-grid software offerings. With Lixar is gets a flexible, user-friendly, cleverly designed energy management and demand-response system that works over multiple protocols and through any Web connection, be it PC-based, BlackBerry or iPhone. I’ve seen it in action and, in my humble opinion, it’s an impressive product.

While it’s a shame to see another promising Canadian venture scooped up by a foreign company, it seems GridPoint is serious about building up its Canadian presence and plans to more than double Lixar’s numbers in Ottawa. Lixar has built up quite a following within the industry, and it has done so quietly. Again, I’ll have more on that in a few days… stay tuned. But for background on what Lixar has done in Ontario, click here.

UPDATE: Wrote an article last week that mentions more details on Lixar and its acquisition by GridPoint. Among the insights: “Back in November, few would have noticed that Lixar signed an exclusive distribution deal with HD Supply, which sells wholesale supplies to utilities, construction companies and other industrial customers. (Home Depot sold off HD Supply in 2007 for $10.4 billion). Through that relationship, Lixar has landed substantial smart-grid pilot projects with major U.S. utilities Xcel Energy and Progress Energy. Industry sources say the company is also working with Duke Energy, Florida Power & Light and National Grid, as well as Cisco. Neither GridPoint nor Lixar would confirm those relationships.”

It’s with great delight that I read about the handful of U.S. utilities that are seriously testing out various conservation, smart grid, storage and renewable technologies in an effort to extend greener offerings to customers. The latest is Duke Energy’s McAlpine Creek project, part of which involves the deployment of a 50 kilowatt solar PV array, consisting of 213 solar panels, at a substation that feeds the grid or, alternatively, can charge up a 500-kilowatt zinc-bromide battery system.

Duke hasn’t revealed any detail of the specific vendor technologies it is using, but I’m betting that the battery system for this particular pilot comes from Mass.-based Premium Power, which is largely operating in stealth mode at the moment. For one, the company’s TransFlow 2000 product fits the bill. It has 500 kilowatts of power and stores up to 500 kilowatts  2.8 megawatt-hours, is UL and CSA certified, and one of its main applications is for the time-shift of renewable generation energy. Boston Power, backed by VantagePoint Venture Partners, claims its storage product costs the same as pumped storage over the long term, or about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. I also remind that last October, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at an event in Toronto, he mentioned that Duke Energy had ordered $100 million worth of Premium Power’s batteries. An advisor and partner with VantagePoint, Kennedy also said a Canadian utility had ordered $100 million of the batteries as well. (more…)