Customers want to know when there will be a smarter utility grid to augment the meters.
FORBES: Avoiding Japan's Nuclear Disaster - Plan Like Google
Therefore large capacities that can be adjusted up and down quickly are a welcome addition to any utility grid and can be treated like a power plant.
FORBES: Why Software-Defined Data Centers Cost Much More Without Optimized Power and Cooling
The current low cost of natural gas in North America translates into the ability for microgrids to provide lower cost energy services than the incumbent utility grid.
Being an on-site power system allows users to run independently of the public utility grid, ensuring that, no matter what happens to the grid, a company will not lose power and will continue to operate.
Today, there is abundant and compelling evidence that shows the failure of prevailing norms of utility regulation and grid governance by many if not most metrics.
FORBES: America's Other Energy Revolution And Why It Matters
The CEO and director of research for Zpryme, a market intelligence and analysis firm for the utility and smart grid industry, said someone appears to have made a mistake in their estimate of how much energy the building's electrical infrastructure could handle.
As noted by Peter Wilson in the American Thinker, Cape Wind has entered into a separate agreement with another utility, National Grid, to sell them their electricity for 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) with a 3.5% annual increase over the next 15 years.
FORBES: Tax-Blowing Boondoggle: Don't Give Wind Energy More Credit Than It Deserves
With a smart grid, utility companies could respond by deferring, reducing, or even shutting down the charging of individual vehicles if the grid reaches capacity.
GridPoint makes its money by selling its smart grid network to utility companies (manufacturing of the devices is handled by a third party).
Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.
Yes, I know A123 also pursued the smart grid market to provide utility-scale storage.
It can work with smart grid devices if the local utility uses them.
FORBES: AeroVironment Will Build A Filling Station In Your Garage
But with a smart grid in place, a utility could restructure rates, and then offer all its customers products that allow either the customer, or the utility, to control usage based on demand and hourly rates.
In May 2007 Kempton formed a coalition of utility and energy experts--Mid-Atlantic Grid Interactive Cars, or Magic--and sought funding to prove the V2G business model.
The utility industry has made significant improvements to the power grid since the blackout of 2003, which disrupted power to an estimated 50 million people in the eastern United States and Canada.
On the contrary, the concrete answer to how we define smart-grid investments will be resolved by every state utility commission when they evaluate utilities request to recover investment costs.
FORBES: Baking the Smart Grid Books: Study Estimates Costs and Benefits
It could facilitate investments in electric grid improvements that enable long-distance transmission of renewable energy, as well as provide consistent long-term policy on grid upgrades and electric vehicle charging that makes utility investments predictably worthwhile.
FORBES: Why "Green Jobs" Don't Belong in Obama's Jobs Program
In new public offerings, Silver Spring Networks, which operates a hardware and software network designed to help utility companies create what is known as a "smart grid, " surged on its listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
Silver Spring operates a hardware and software network designed to help utility companies create what is known as a "smart grid, " or a responsive electrical infrastructure that can provide data on usage to help lower costs and maximize efficiency.
The gasoline engine serves as an on-board personal electric utility for when you forget to plug in to the local grid, or for ensuring a total range to match that of any conventional car you'd buy today.
Customers (in this case the school district) pay no money up-front, paying only for the solar energy they use and typically seeing reductions on their utility bills as soon as the system is connected to the grid.
The results: only about one-third of the utility call centers contacted could answer all the questions about the smart grid and smart meters.
But many of the 3 million customers of this solid New England outfit might be surprised to know that this utility is a subsidiary of U.K.-based National Grid Transco.
The current 10-year railway ministry bonds are yielding 5.2%, compared with 5.04% for the same type of debt issued by the State Grid Corp. of China, the world's largest utility by revenue.
OnStar will allow researchers to develop services such as demand-response that would allow drivers that sign up to let the utility control when their Volt is charged to minimize the impact on the grid in exchange for receiving a lower electricity rate or other incentives.
FORBES: Austin Community To Become A Volt Village To Test GM Electric Cars' Impact On Grid
Less than one tenth of utilities have moved beyond the planning stage for the smart grid and into implementation, according the results of the Microsoft Worldwide Utility Industry Survey 2011.
Those demand spikes are unavoidable mini-disasters for energy companies -- their own grid doesn't have the power on hand, and the utility has to buy it elsewhere -- competing with other utilities trying to keep the lights on for their customers.
In 2003, IBM co-founded the US-based GridWise Alliance that advocates for grid modernization, and in 2007, IBM formed the Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition (GIUNC), a coalition of players in the energy and utilities market, which is helping accelerate the adoption and use of smart grid technologies and bringing digital intelligence to current systems.
ENGADGET: IBM announces Smarter Energy Research Institute, aims to improve energy grids (video)
The grid makes the former Yugoslavia look simple: local municipalities, the individual state utility commissions, the North America Electric Reliability Council, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and other agencies all have a say.
FORBES: Protecting the Electric Grid from Terrorism -- Nobody is in Charge
Just this week the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) passed a resolution endorsing the continuing modernization of the electric system with smart grid technologies.
WHITEHOUSE: Energy and Environment Latest News | The White House
应用推荐