A Greener Grid
• Distributed Energy Resources
• Power Quality/Energy Sensing
• Demand Side Management/Direct Load Control
Today’s grid is outdated and results in many economical losses for commercial and residential end-users. These losses come in many forms, from basic outages to more complicated power quality disturbances, which are becoming more and more serious in an economy dependent upon digital processes. It is one aim of the smart grid is to utilize multiple technologies to reduce PQ issues, which cost the U.S. economy over $100BB a year.
On any given day in the U.S., approximately half a million people looses power for two hours and an additional 30,000 industrial customers are impacted by PQ disturbances including voltage sags, transients and unbalances in the three phase voltages. A one-tenth of a second disruption in PQ, which literally is a blink of an eye, can cause refineries to shut down or a semiconductor processing plant to stop production and it may take hours to get back to normal production.2. Power disturbances were estimated at 1% of GDP in 2002.3.
Many companies offer solutions that protect end-users from PQ issues when they arise, however the utilities’ goal is to stop them before they reach the end-user. To do this, the utility company needs to have a real-time understanding of the power quality traversing the grid at any given moment through AMR and sensors allocated throughout the distribution grid. Ambient’s Energy Sensing products connect the utility’s network operation center to each Ambient node in real-time, making available voltage and current information of the grid at the node’s location. With multiple nodes connected to the NOC distributed throughout the grid, utilities can compile information to give a real-time picture of grid performance. If intelligent devices such as distributed energy resources (DER) are incorporated into the smart grid communications network, PQ issues can be addressed when identified in real-time, prior to reaching the end-user.
2. Electric Power Research Institute; “Infrastructure Quality and Reliability” September 22, 2003 p.8