There’s a lot we don’t know about exactly what happened when the lights went out in the Super Bowl. But here’s what we do know:

Not all the lights went out: One-third of the lights stayed on throughout that excruciating half hour.  That probably means that the uninterruptable power supply system worked as planned.  The only problem was that the UPS system was sized to one-third the necessary power needs of the stadium.

The lights weren’t the only things going out:  The CBS announcers lost power, as apparently did the top-level cameras and the coaches’ communications systems.  This points to a failure in wiring the building’s critical circuits.  By far the most important thing to keep going in the case of an emergency (after emergency lighting and the PA system, both of which worked) is the power to the television operations.  Television is what pays everyone’s bills, so that should have priority over other systems.  It did not.  Likewise, the fact that one team’s communications systems continued to work (the 49ers’) and the other’s didn’t (the Ravens), showed that someone didn’t think very clearly when designing the critical circuit design.

LEDs Still Shone: If you looked carefully at the scenes of the blackened sections of the stadium seating, you could see that the emergency stair lights were all still lit.  Likewise, the exterior colored lighting that bathes the outside walls of the stadium in light was still working.  That’s because it’s made up of LEDs, which consume a fraction of a percentage of the power required by the sodium high intensity discharge (HID) lamps used for the rest of the stadium lighting.  Additionally, the sodium HIDs, once they went out, took another 20 minutes to regain their full luminosity.  LED’s, on the other hand, require no warm-up time and sip so little electricity that managing the current for them is a much less complex task.

Engineers & Repairmen

Based on this knowledge, here are three important lessons learned from the power management debacle that was Super Bowl XLVII:

• Right-sizing a UPS backup microgrid is about more than just installing a bunch of generators.  The art of designing a backup microgrid is about balancing the maximum number of diesel gen-sets with the minimal amount of load.  Physical space for backup gen-sets is almost always limited (especially in a flood plain like New Orleans, where generators have to be placed – at a minimum – on the second floor).  Thus keeping the blackout from happening was more of a failure of critical circuit design than of generator management.
• Energy efficiency counts more than backup power in times of emergency.  The failure of the sodium HID lights and the long warm-up time they require would have been solved by energy efficient LED lights, which also would have reduced the load on the UPS system.
• Electrical design engineers are always more valuable than electric repairmen.  Designing the critical circuits to be prioritized during a power failure is a job worth doing right, as we saw on Sunday evening.  The designers of the Superdome’s UPS circuitry got some things very right: the success of the emergency lighting system kept the crowd from panicking.  But the problems with the broadcasting and team communications systems showed that not everything was so well-planned.

This article originally appeared on the blog of Pike Research. Pike Research, a part of Navigant Consulting’s global Energy Practice, is a market research and consulting team that provides in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets. Pike Research is also a partner of GigaOM Pro, GigaOM’s premium research service.

Image courtesy of delgaudm, Flickr creative commons.

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The network will test out solar power, energy storage and electric grid management and produce data and analyses over the next six months, said Japanese solar panel maker, Kyocera, which is taking part in the project. The project also involves the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Los Alamos Department of Public Utilities. NEDO itself is a group of government, research institutions and private tech companies such as Kyocera, Toshiba and Hitachi.

The participants held a ceremony this week to kick off the operation of the $52 million project, which involves a micro-grid and a “smart house” demonstration in Los Alamos. The Japanese consortium also is working on a smart building project in a mixed-use community in Albuquerque called Mesa del Sol.

NEDO and its affiliated Japanese companies decided to head to New Mexico to test smart grid technologies with the local utility in Los Alamos partly because Japanese utilities aren’t as flexible or able to act as quickly to accommodate the project, according to this 2011 presentation by the Los Alamos utility company. The Japanese companies also want to sell their technologies in the U.S. and take an active role in setting international technical standards for smart grid. The Los Alamos lab will help with data collection, management and modeling.

The consortium conceived of the project a few years back and signed an agreement to carry it out in 2010. While the goal back then included an intent to tackle the U.S. market, the results from the project could serve Japan as well, particularly since the country has been keen on boosting renewable energy generation ever since its Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in March 2011. Kyocera, for example, earlier this year announced a plan to sell solar energy systems with batteries to homeowners in Japan.

Adding more renewable energy into the grid presents technical and operational challenges for utilities and grid operators. Solar and wind power, for example, can only be generated at certain hours of the day and night, and weather conditions have a big impact on their production rates. Since an electric grid works best when there is a balance of supply and demand, grid operators have to figure out how to make up for any short fall or surge of renewable energy that could happen at any time. Power plants that use coal, natural gas and nuclear, on the other hand, can produce a steady stream of power.

Many other utilities and tech companies are carrying out similar demonstration projects in the U.S. in order to meet their state mandates to increasing the use of renewable energy.

One of the two projects underway within Los Alamos utility’s territory creates a micro-grid using a 1 MW solar energy system and a 1.8 MW/8.3 Mwh battery system. The solar energy will course through a particular distribution line to test its impact on the grid.

The second project will put solar panels on a home, which has been built especially for the project (check out the Los Alamos Daily Post’s report), and pairs the solar system by Kyocera with a 24 kWh lithium-ion battery system, a heat pump storage unit, and sensors and communication equipment. The idea is to figure out how to operate all this equipment to meet the energy demand of the home and respond to any requests from the utility or grid operator to use the solar electricity for balancing the grid.

Photo courtesy of Kyocera

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But Balance Energy — a San Diego-based offshoot of British military contractor BAE Systems — sees the bigger promise of microgrids in the private sector, not as islands of power unto themselves, but as trading partners, making and sharing electricity with each other and the grid at large.

Balance Energy’s fully functioning, interconnected microgrids don’t exist yet, though many are being worked on in a pilot project fashion. But as far as Terry Mohn, Balance Energy’s chief innovation officer, is concerned, the time has passed for doing tests — “We’re doing deployments,” he said.

Mohn is a former smart grid chief at San Diego Gas & Electric, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy, who joined Balance Energy last year and introduced the company in a September coming-out party at the GridWeek event in Washington DC. (see Greentech Media). Since then, the BAE Systems subsidiary has kept a military-level veil of secrecy over its activities, posting little on its Web site beyond hard-to-read industry white papers.

But in an interview last week, Mohn said the company has been involved in “dozens” of projects, ranging in scale from 500 kilowatts to as large as 50 megawatts, though the larger projects may require linking several smaller ones together to reach scale.

While he declined to name any customers, it’s likely that Balance Energy could be continuing its partnership role with SDG&E’s plan for a microgrid at the University of California at San Diego campus — although that project may be scaled back after it failed to secure a $100 million Department of Energy smart grid grant late last year.

Balance Energy’s role in all this is to integrate the variety of systems — distributed generation, energy storage, load control and demand response systems, power quality management devices, and the all-important point of connection to the larger grid — that make up microgrids, Mohn said. BAE’s decades of experience building and managing complex military IT systems are likely to serve it well in that task, he said.

The military contractor’s deep pockets will also serve it well, noted Steve Luker, vice president of business development for BAE:

“If you look at a microgrid, the majority of cost is still on the generation side,” he said. “We have a significant portion of the company that’s out developing renewable generation projects that can be used in the context of the microgrid, along with demand response, control system side, storage side, and the pricing mechanism side.”

But, unlike many other microgrid proponents, Balance Energy isn’t focused on solar and wind power for its renewable generation goals, he said. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent, while Balance Energy is primarily focused on power that can improve better overall grid stability — though it will look at wind and solar if they’re economical, he said.

Instead, Balance Energy is looking to fuel cells that operate on biogas and natural gas  — “We have heavy projects around those,” Luker said, mostly in California. Biomass gasification and municipal solid waste gasification, as well as small hydro, are also on the company’s renewables list, he said. Just which fuel cell, gasification and hydroelectric companies Balance Energy is working with, he declined to say. (On that note fuel cell maker Bloom Energy launched yesterday and has been selling its fuel cells, which operate on natural gas and methane, to companies in California, to take advantage of the state subsidy).

As for the question of whether utilities will help their customers build their own microgrids and integrate them, “We are starting on the customer side, and inviting utilities to participate,” Mohn said. Eventually, “We think that utilities will take an investor stake into customer assets. We’re negotiating with utilities now to do that. It’s going to take some time to get there, but it’s certainly a preferred method.”

Other military contractors have been working on microgrids as they’ve shifted into the smart grid space. Lockheed Martin is working with some dozen utilities on smart grid projects, including a few microgrid projects (see Greentech Media), and Boeing’s smart grid work includes a DOE stimulus-winning project in New York with Consolidated Edison and microgrid management software maker Viridity Energy.

But Balance Energy envisions linking multiple microgrids together in a web of dispatchable (always available) power and demand response capacity, and that sets the firm apart. Achieving that ambition will require plenty of sophisticated controls and predictive analysis technology, but then, BAE’s been doing that kind of stuff for military clients for some time, Luker noted. In fact, the idea of multiple microgrids all linked together is quite like the general concept of the smart grid — a point that hasn’t been lost on many of the key thinkers working on smart grid systems.

Eventually, Mohn said, utilities could find ways to utilize Balance Energy’s technology for linking multiple microgrids to accomplish tasks like sharing power between one another. While entities known as independent system operators (ISOs) and regional transmission organizations (RTOs) manage that task in parts of the country, much of the South and Mountain West doesn’t have such entities in place, he noted.

As for whether Balance Energy intends to own and operate its own microgrids as a way to generate revenue, or it will build and maintain them on behalf of clients, Luker says: “I think we can do both.” “In some cases, it may be that the utility prefers to manage the microgrid themselves, and we’d turn over the NOC license to the utility. In other cases, it may be a campus, or an industrial campus, or working with our own customers on the military base side — they’re basically small cities — that may want to manage their resources themselves.”

Most microgrids of the future won’t be making and storing enough power to be grid-independent all of the time. Instead, microgrids will maintain a constant and complex relationship with the utility — buying power at some times, selling it back at others, either disconnecting from the grid to avoid a power outage or reconnecting to help the grid balance its way through instabilities, depending on the circumstances. So a central question for the future of microgrids is what will the relationship be with utilities — will it be utilities, or their customers, that pay for them and control them?

“I don’t think it’s even close to being baked out yet, as to what those relationships will look like,” Pacyna said in a recent interview. But Siemens, a major player in the smart grid, does appear to be making some bets. For example, the German engineering giant is working with BPL Global to link up its utility-controlled distributed generation and demand response devices in homes and other buildings in a microgrid-like fashion — and BPL is “fully focused on the theory that all of their capabilities are basically designed to be utility-sponsored and utility-driven,” he said.

Some of the first working examples of a microgrid have been installed by American Electric Power, which wants to own and operate them to help communities prone to loss of grid power and avoid building new transmission lines. And most of the microgrid projects currently underway are being led by utilities.

On the other hand, Siemens is also working with Viridity Energy, a startup that makes software to manage microgrids and has projects underway in New York and Philadelphia. Viridity Energy’s CEO, Audrey Zibelman, places herself firmly on the customer side of the microgrid debate.

Zibelman’s idea of an effective microgrid is based on the premise that the customer owns the resource and maximizes its value by selling self-generated power — or “negawatts” of reduced power demand — into more and more markets that have traditionally been the domain of utilities and their big power plant partners. The more money microgrids can make that way, the faster they’ll be built, and that should help the utilities with grid stability and integrating distributed generation sources like rooftop solar panels into their renewable energy goals.

But not if the utilities get in the way. “I think the model for the industry can’t be one that says it’s exclusively the utility’s domain to develop these microgrids,” she said in a February interview. “I just don’t see where utilities that want to operate microgrids for stability will be as aware of the economic benefits to the customer.” To be sure, it’s not that she’s advocating an adversarial relationship between utilities and their microgrid customers, but instead likens the relationship to telecom customers, as in, “They don’t want the telephone company to tell them what kind of cell phone they can buy.”

Indeed, the evolving relationship between utilities and their customers could be likened to the changes that have come to the telecommunications industry since the breakup of Ma Bell. The Galvin Electricity Initiative, which is leading a Department of Energy grant-backed microgrid project at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, sees microgrids as a path toward what it calls a “consumer-driven electric power system,” one in which every customer has full access to open markets for power that’s priced dynamically, and every community has the right to an electricity distribution system that meets its needs.

In some cases, microgrids are being planned alongside communities’ efforts to gain energy independence from their utility. Take Marin County, which has created Marin Clean Energy, a “community choice aggregation” (CCA) public power entity allowed under California law to buy and sell electricity from wholesale power markets on behalf of residents in place of their local utility, in this case Pacific Gas & Electric. Marin County is also hosting a microgrid demonstration project linking five municipal buildings, featuring software from Boulder, Colo.-based Infotility and backing from DOE and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The idea, according to Infotility, is to scale up the microgrid model to eventually “enable utilities and communities to manage distributed renewable energy supplies such as solar and wind as conventional grid assets, as a foundation and reliable part of their energy portfolio” — a future that sounds pretty close to that envisioned by smart grid proponents. But in this instance, utility-community conflict is already built in — PG&E is the sole backer of a California ballot measure that would amend the state’s constitution to require a difficult to obtain two-thirds vote for citizens to form a CCA, a move that has drawn the ire of backers of public power, including the Galvin Electricity Initiative’s executive director, Kurt Yaeger.

Image courtesy of NREL Solar Decathlon 2009’s photostream Flickr Creative Commons.

But utilities, as well as their customers and partners, are increasingly looking past microgrids’ ability to “island” themselves to protect from broader power outages, and are seeking out ways they can use their on-site distributed power generation, and demand reduction and management systems to help the grid at large. Theoretically, these types of microgrids could help the outside grid keep its own power quality stable, helping entire neighborhoods ride through disruptions. And at the end of the road, microgrids could sell their generation and demand reduction back to the utilities they usually buy power from, giving would-be microgrid operators a whole new set of financial incentives to help bolster their business cases.

Legos of the Smart Grid

In fact, these bite-sized smart grid systems could be an inevitable part of the build out of the “super grid” envisioned by such smart grid champions as Al Gore. That’s because microgrids could help ease the “smart at the edges, dumb in the middle” problem recently described by Ray Gogel, president and COO of Current Group. Gogel told Forbes in February that all the smart meters, rooftop solar panels and other “nodes” on the edges of the grid will require much more robust communications and controls along the “middle mile” of distribution substations and feeder lines to operate effectively. Properly designed and integrated microgrids could aggregate many of these edge nodes into a single point of interconnection and interface, making the job of coordinating them in the middle that much easier.

Dave Pacyna, senior vice president of Siemens Energy’s North American transmission and distribution division, sees microgrids as a natural part of the evolution of the smart grid. Pacyna said in a January interview:

“When it comes to a utility figuring out how to manage this wide, dynamic set of resources and control points, the only way they can do that efficiently is to break their networks down into small nodes – i.e. microgrids – and then add a level of control on top of it.”

Siemens would like to provide a few key software platforms to manage the disparate smart grid technologies being installed by utilities today, which means that it’s working with multiple sets of partners, including microgrid partners. For example it is partnering with microgrid management software provider Viridity Energy, and has teamed up with BPL Global to take advantage of the latter company’s system for controlling loads, such as HVAC systems and industrial motors, that can be put together in microgrid structures, Pacyna said.

Microgrids As Tools

How do microgrids help utilities manage their smart grid ambitions? One of the most recent examples comes from American Electric Power, which since 1999 has worked within the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS), a Department of Energy/California Energy Commission-led group that’s concentrated on inverter technologies to allow the fast, safe disconnection and reconnection of microgrids to the larger grid. Modern inverters can also allow a microgrid’s power to serve as backup and stabilizer for the outside grid. Pike Research has pointed to the CERTS systems as among the first to standardize microgrid-grid interconnections. Will more such standard connection systems emerge?

Last year, AEP showed that its East Busco, Indiana microgrid, could island itself and keep itself powered using CERTS-based technology and large-scale sodium sulfur batteries, according to Smart Grid News. AEP has three such islanding projects underway in Indiana, West Virginia and Ohio, and sees them partly as a way to avoid building more transmission lines to far-off service areas, said Brad Roberts, power quality systems director for S&C Electric, one of the companies working with the utility.

That points out another benefit of microgrids — they could help utilities use distributed power generation systems like solar panels on customers’ rooftops in a far more effective way. This, in turn, could help them cut back on the need for a massive investment (and permitting nightmare) in building lots of new high-voltage transmission lines to carry renewable power from far-off wind farms and utility-scale solar plants to towns and cities. Locally-based solar, wind, biomass generators, fuel cells and other distributed generation systems would be much more convenient sources of power, and would cut down on the line losses associated with long-range transmission to boot. But right now, distributed generation systems are more of a headache than a help for most utilities, since utilities can’t control the way those resources put power onto the grid. Too much intermittent solar power can cause grid instability, for example — see Greentech Media for a breakdown of the challenge.

The Potential

The smart grid is expected to cost about $165 billion over the coming years, according to a recent middle-road estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute. Taking a larger view, the Galvin Electricity Initiative — a nonprofit founded by former Motorola CEO Bob Galvin that is a big proponent of microgrids — estimates that the world will need $6 trillion in grid investment over the next 25 years. What share of that build out will come in the form of microgrids? According to Pike Research, the microgrid market will grow to about $7.8 billion in cumulative investment by 2015 or so.

Where are the next-generation microgrids being built? Right now, several microgrid projects are being funded with DOE smart grid stimulus grants, including Galvin Electricity Initiative’s Perfect Power System at the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago. Viridity Energy is involved in two stimulus-funded projects — one with Consolidated Edison in New York City, and another with PECO at the Philadelphia campus of Drexel University. San Diego Gas & Electric is working on a small-scale microgrid project in Borrego Spring, Calif., but a larger project planned for the University of California at San Diego campus may be reconsidered after it failed to secure DOE funding last fall.

There are more projects that incorporate various concepts that underlie microgrids, including “virtual power plants” that coordinate local distributed generation and demand response resources, and distribution automation systems that apply new technologies to balance grid power. But just what is and isn’t a microgrid is a matter of some uncertainty, with definitions shifting as time goes on. Stay tuned for future posts on these distinctions, and other microgrid-related topics — including the question of whether it will be utilities or private operators who push them forward the fastest.

Image courtesy of NREL Solar Decathlon 2009′s photostream Flickr Creative Commons.

Previously, Offline Gmail existed in the Labs as an experimental feature in Gmail. It used Google Gears to allow users to cache email on the local computer, so that access was possible even when offline. Aside from making Offline Gmail part of the official Gmail implementation, two features have been added to make it work more to the user’s liking. The first is the ability to choose which messages get cached locally, providing for more control for users with massive amounts of Gmail stored. The second is the ability to send attachments while offline, something previously not possible.

To get going with Offline Gmail just follow these instructions from Google:

1. Click the “Settings” link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the “Offline” tab.
3. Select “Enable Offline Mail for this computer.”
4. Click “Save Changes” and follow the directions from there.

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For the Marine microgrid, GE will develop software and deploy its microgrid controllers to enable the base to more efficiently use local power generation, including renewable energy sources like solar, as well as maintain energy storage devices. The management system will also enable the microgrid to connect with and disconnect from the surrounding grid when necessary. John Kern, manager of GE’s Smart Grid Research Lab, said in a statement that the microgrid project “will serve as a model for other bases and it also will demonstrate how similar types of facilities, such as industrial complexes and universities, can take advantage of a smarter grid.”

Microgrids are interesting because they can offer a testbed for emerging technologies (GigaOM Pro, sub required) like various forms of energy storage and grid-connected renewable energy sources. But unlike GE’s other smart grid projects, the Marine microgrid won’t be using GE’s smart meters or home energy management systems to reduce individual’s energy consumption. The $2 million in federal funds also won’t be coming from the much-talked-about smart grid stimulus funds from the Department of Energy, but GE has accessed funds from the stimulus for the Department of Defenses’ Environmental Security Technology Certification Program.

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