Smart grid technology is coming to South Central Helena — and if tests there are successful in lowering electricity consumption, then more NorthWestern Energy customers across Helena and Montana can expect a more intimate relationship with their electrical meters in the future.

When trying to describe what a smart grid is, it might be easier to explain first what it isn’t.

“Smart grid” isn’t a revolutionary way of delivering electricity. And installing a smart grid doesn’t mean tearing out the existing electrical infrastructure and replacing it with something completely different.

Rather, smart grid might be best described as a series of incremental improvements along the entire course of the electrical system, from transmission to distribution to household use — improvements designed to make the entire system more efficient and more reliable at the same time.

Many of the improvements center around communication — devices along distribution lines that can communicate with the utility, and meters on homes that can share data with customers, providing near-real time information about their energy use.

NorthWestern Energy last week learned that a group of 12 utilities, including NorthWestern, was selected for an $89 million Department of Energy grant, to be matched by the utilities for a $178 million pilot smart grid project that will test various technologies across the Northwest.

The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project will be led by the private firm Battelle, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory it runs for the DOE in Richland, Wash.

The lab includes an electricity information operations center, which spokeswoman Annie Haas said “can read data coming in from the grid and analyze it. We’re studying ways the nation can better deliver reliable and secure energy.”

The project includes one other Montana utility — the Flathead Electric Cooperative. Utilities in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming are involved, along with the Bonneville Power Administration.

Each utility will implement and study a different aspect of smart grid technology, with the results shared with the rest of the group so efforts aren’t duplicated.

“Each (project) will be tailored to the specific region or the needs of that area,” Haas said.

NorthWestern’s portion of the project will be tested in Helena — specifically, at the Capitol complex and in the surrounding neighborhood.

“One of the reasons we looked at Helena is that in order to test the new technology, you’ve got to have good infrastructure underneath it,” said George Horvath, NorthWestern’s manager of distributive engineering. A strong infrastructure in Helena meant the utility could test the technology here without having to first pay to upgrade the base system.

John Carmody, the utility’s director of engineering, planning and asset management, said it hasn’t been completely determined what the Helena portion of the pilot project will include. Cutting-edge home electricity meters are a good bet, though.

From the consumer perspective, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of smart grid technology is what’s called advanced metering infrastructure, a metering system that can collect and analyze information about electricity usage, and share that information with both the utility and the customer.

“It has the communications component so the utility can talk to the meter on a near real-time basis, constantly recording usage and other power quality issues,” Horvath said. “We used to get one reading a month, now we could get one every 15 minutes. Imagine what the customer could do with that data if we could get that back to the customer via the Internet.”

Added Carmody: “What we’re looking at on the utility side is, does it make sense to go out and invest in this new technology? We’re trying to measure a couple of points on the metering side to see if these are good economics company-wide.”

Ken Toole, who represents Helena on the Montana Public Service Commission, said simply providing customers with more detailed information is proven to lower electricity use.

“When you put a meter on someone’s house that simply tells them how much power they’re using, consumption goes down between 6 and 18 percent,” he said.

Toole said using smart grid technology to lower electricity use on a house-by-house basis can ultimately reduce the need for the massive capital investment that’s needed for new power plants.

“Traditionally, utilities decide what peak (usage) is and then build the generation resources to meet peak plus 15 percent,” Toole said. “It’s only been the last four or five years that have been, before we talk about building something new, let’s talk about knocking down the peak.”

A lot of the technology isn’t new — but it’s cheaper than it used to be.

“We had a lot of the technology 15 years ago, but it wasn’t economically feasible at that time,” Carmody said. A chip that may have cost thousands of dollars a decade ago might cost $3 today — cheap enough to be installed at hundreds of points along the transmission or distribution systems.

 

John Harrington: 447-4080 or john.harrington

@helenair.com