Anyways, those fundamentals that you talk about needing to be re-engineered…well that’s only really the case if you’re stuck with the paradigm of synchronous or induction-based interconnections. If you’re a proponent of microgrids – parallel, non-synchronous microgrids that just treat utility grid power as one among many sources of power and that look to the utility like nothing more than pure load reduction (to be a bit more specific)— then the approach to interconnection is going to have to be inverter based. That’s the only way large scale deployment of DG microgrids is going to happen.

The next step will be to get those microgrids to either talk to each other or talk to the utility substation — a much easier task than you make it out to be. Remember, the speed of communications along an ethernet cable or a WLAN are talking place at the kHz level and above…a few orders of magnitude faster than the 60Hz phase frequency for utility power. So no its not that hard to get the digital controls to respond in ‘real time’. I’m pretty sure that GE has a nice little black box that does this for the microgrid bus already.
Technically its not that difficult…but then we’re back again to those slow moving utilities…moving a few orders of magnitude slower than the 60Hz power they send through their wires.

No, reliability is job number 1. It’s not risk aversion, it’s called the primary responsibility and government mandate. That regulation is the price they pay for having a monopoly. At the same time I’m not going to apologize for slow uptake on technology and poor communication models from corporate offices. That’s the downside of monopoly. But if you had electricity delivery interrupted as much as internet service, there would be an armed uprising. Reliability and safety are super important.

Distributed generation sounds easy and wonderful, but there are some fundamentals built into the existing grid that need to be re-engineered. And that takes time, plain and simple. Connectivity is definitely one of the issues. Overcurrent protection devices are what protects the distribution network, but there are real issues setting those up for distributed sources. Fault current is a nasty bugger to work with when it varies according to the source. Even if you can get these new devices installed, they do no good if you can’t communicate with them in real-time.

It takes bandwidth to do real-time communication with devices that respond within one wave cycle to ever changing conditions. And so communication has to be carefully planned and engineered. It’s estimated that there is 300,000 times as much data to consider when operating all of these smart nodes, so that’s a serious problem.

Wherever smartgrid is going, it’s going to take time to get there. Microgrids have a much larger chance of succeeding in the short-run until utilities re-engineer their systems.

About that time pricing- I’m sure, TIm, that can be massaged to the utilities advantage, and that it will….from their side a few dollars upgrade a bunch new recievables. From the customers perspective a meter to take out a mortgage on and a few dollars monthly….will it be one of those non-amortizing affairs like some recent home payment scams? Considering what some will pay as a “premium” for green cars- I bet , ah, how to say it except yep old P.T. Barnum is still right.

This sounds like something the Sphinx would say in the movie, “Mystery Men”.

Anyway….

The smart grid is really of benefit to the utilities, not the consumers. As a result, unless we are careful, we will end up with a solution that likely will be utility oriented, at the expense of the consumer. All that’s really needed is real-time pricing, to which the consumer can react to with either manual or automatic controls guiding his/her instantaneous consumption. But it’s gotta be KISS, because the typical consumer would likely save less than $20 per month at best, with any such scheme. That doesn’t pay for too many smart appliances.

I’m not 100% convinced about the overall economic impact of home energy management and its viability in the market place but if a communication network build out happens anyway, communication infrastructure security has to be the top consideration for any network architecture and protocol designs.

The underlying electro-mechanical technology at every substation, radial network, spot network, service transformer and circuit recloser (and everything in between) has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s.

Grid operators have been able to get away with using this type of technology largely because of the network topology of the grid is simple: top-down, one-way power flows. Electricity travels from the generating stations through transmission lines, to substations, to distribution wires and finally to a service drop with essentially no room for interference from sideways or upstream power flows.

The problem that looms just as large as the information flows that smart meters will provide is interconnection. Simply put, the grid in its current form is unable to manage any type of peer-to-peer power flow from any kind of distributed generation. So, utilities place strict penetration limits on the amount of power that can be present on part of a feeder that isn’t originating at the substation

Understandably, utilities are averse to risks to safety and grid stability, but there are technical solutions to the interconnection issue that don’t require a complete rebuilding of the electricity grid and its control schemes.

The problem with the antiquated technology (and 19th century thinking that went into determining how grid power flows were to be managed) is that it necessarily limits the amount of clean, reliable, and economically viable distributed generation that can exist. Plenty of room for massive wind farms, concentrated solar and other big central plants. All of those, of course, require massive (think trillions of dollars) investments in transmission lines…the very same ones that lose up to 10% of the power being delivered over them.