March 30: Which technology holds the most promise for a smarter, more reliable grid?

[Jesse Berst]

First off, thanks to everyone who has shared your opinions in this forum the past 16 days – we've been impressed with all of the thoughtful analysis and hope you'll stay in touch by subscribing to our free email alert if you don't already. We'll be announcing the winner of the New iPad next week.

For our 16th and final topic, we're curious which of the many smart grid technologies you think holds the most promise – and why.

[Mike McCrory]

Smart meters - as I understand things - will help provide the consumer with capability to to respond to their own power demands and change habits. On a broad scale this will result in a substantial benefit to the overall grid.

[Richard Damiano]

Voltage optimization gathers the important data about system loading and voltage, analyzes this data to make changes to the voltage, can recommend configuration changes to reduce losses, reduces energy consumption and demand, relieves capacity constraints, and provides actionable data about developing problems. It is a broad based and thoughtful approach to conservation and demand management which provides benefits to the utility and the customer without requiring behavior changes at the customer level.

Smart meters are a great tool to support this and other initiatives which can help to manage energy usage but doesn't speak to the system as a whole. Likewise energy storage and demand response. Distribution automation is the other heavy hitter on this list but doesn't address energy or demand. But you can see from my initial response that I have closely linked voltage optimization and distribution automation for a comprehensive solution of which AMI is likely a key component.

[David Green]

Distribution automation is an important "supra-technology" that is built on top of the other technologies mentioned, making it an essential Smart Gird management tool. It is applicable without these supporting technologies, of course, but its impact as a decision making engine improves dramatically when there are leverge-able assets in place in the field, such as tie lines, distributed gen and storage, or enhanced data feeds like smart meters.

[Kyle Cormier]

I went with voltage optimization. Utilities have been doing this for a while and I think it's lower hanging fruit that has a quick payback.

[Brian Young]

I think smart meters are severely limited in their reliability impacts by customer apathy. Energy storage and distribution automation are still a few steps down the road. Voltage optimization has been going on for a while, but generation and transmission have always been very smart relative to the distribution and meter side of the industry.

Demand response can do the heavy lifting for apathetic users and provide business value to companies that opt in to a program. It engages the consumer side of the equation, where I believe the most gains towards reliability and 'smartness' are found. Its load balancing characteristics maximize the capacity of our current infrastructure and avoid building costly new plants and transmission lines. It also benefits both the consumer and utility by shifting load to cheaper generation times, reducing a consumer's bill and saving the utility the cost of ramping up the costliest generators. There are also technology (appliance and thermostats) and non-tech ways to do this, and the flexibility means it can be implemented now as opt-in for businesses (where utilities call them and say they need to shut off power) and scaled up when the technology is ready.