Smart Grids In Malta, Ontario And Beyond  

BusinessGreen reports that Malta will become the world's first island covered with a smart grid, with IBM to install 250,000 smart meters - Malta's Smart Grid.

Malta has contracted IBM to install a £70m smart utility grid and replace 250,000 analogue electricity and water meters with smart meters by 2012.

The Maltese National Electricity and Water Utilities Enemalta and Water Services Corporation (WSC) says the deal will also include advanced IT applications enabling utilities to remotely monitor and suspend meters, as well as allowing consumers more choice over their tariffs.

Smart grids are considered vital to improving the energy efficiency of electricity grids in Europe, some of which date back to the 1960s. They allow utilities to monitor demand much more accurately, saving on emissions by not having to over-estimate electricity use, and identifying more accurate patterns of use.

“This agreement will not just transform Enemalta’s metering operations but will also help us introduce new back-office applications to provide an unprecedented customer relations service,” said Enemalta’s chief executive Karl Camilleri. “With the right infrastructure in place to distribute electricity on the national grid, we are looking at ways to optimise current operations as well as open up potentially new, untapped markets in the way we conduct our business operations.”

The utilities will save money by not having to employ meter readers, and by identifying problems with the grid much more quickly.

Customers will have an internet window to their technical and commercial data, to track current consumption and choose the most appropriate tariffs. The implementation of an advanced automated meter-management system will also allow the firm to improve its water loss-management initiatives.

The conservatives recently outlined plans to invest £1bn in a smart grid in Britain.

Tyler Hamilton has a post at Clean Break on proposals to build a smart grid in Ontario - Task force: spend $1.6 billion on Ontario smart grid over five years.

It’s been a long-time coming, but finally the electricity sector in Ontario has taken a close look at what a smart grid might look like and what it will take to get us there. The Ontario Smart Grid Forum, made up of electricity sector executives and officials, released a white paper this week that, among other things, recommended that the province spend $320 million annually for the next five years on smart grid technology deployment — and that’s above and beyond existing budget allocations for grid maintenance, expansion and smart meter deployment.

It would be a decent chunk of change, at least measured against the pittance the federal government has allocated for the entire country — that is, some unknown portion of a $1 billion “green” fund spread over five years. In the United States, a stimulus bill under discussion would devote $11 billion (U.S.) over two years. ...

David McFadden, an energy lawyer and a member of the task force, said the province is leading the continent with smart meter deployments but shouldn’t, at this critical juncture, rest on its laurels. Smart meters, he said, are but one small — albeit significant piece — of a much larger, more powerful puzzle. “What we should be doing is moving rapidly and taking a real lead in terms of systems, technology, software, all the way through the entire electricity system,” said McFadden

Now we’re talking. Fact is, Ontario has many things it can leverage — a world-class transmission utility, a diverse power mix, a strategy to shut down coal plants, and a commitment to renewables. We also have a strong telecommunications and IT heritage that, combined with our expertise in traditional energy fields, could be used to make Ontario a clear leader in smart-grid development. All it needs now is a comprehensive plan, a vision behind it, and a commitment from both government and the private sector to come together and make it happen. It could become a significant source of job creation for the province, and a significant path to export opportunities.

Earth2Tech notes that while smart grids are now getting a lot of attention, smart grid companies may struggle this year - Even With Stimulus, Smart Grid Could Face Rough Year.

The smart grid might have launched into the mainstream lexicon recently with GE’s super bowl ad and funding included in the current stimulus package, but the budding industry could falter out of the gate in this economic climate. Smart grid companies are showing some concern over utilities slowing down smart grid rollout plans in the near term, and the stimulus package is actually just a drop in the bucket of the investment needed to launch a nationwide smart grid. ...

Earlier this week, analysts at UBS downgraded Itron, a heavyweight smart meter maker, and said while the company: “may receive new [advanced metering infrastructure] awards at some point in 2009, we believe this is balanced with a risk that ‘09 guidance is revised downwards at some point due to utility capex cuts and/or AMI project delays.” ...

And while the industry is pointing to the $4.5 billion boost in smart grid funding in the proposed stimulus package (both the House and Senate versions), those funds are actually a small percent of what a national smart grid network would need. Ed Legge, an analyst with the Edison Electric Institute, told us that at least $50 billion is needed for all the investor-owned utilities (which make up 70 percent of the U.S. utilities) to roll out smart grid networks. It would cost about $500 million for each utility, Legge said. That’s a substantial investment for a utility that is facing reduced their demand for energy from customers.

Still, “there is a lot of optimism” around smart grid rollouts these days, said Legge, adding that “the technology is moving forward, not backward.” Utilities like Pepco Holdings and CenterPoint announced smart grid plans just this week. Eric Miller, Chief Solutions Officer, for Trilliant, a company that makes hardware and software for smart meters, says while he’s heard his industry’s concern over a slower rollout, his company is still seeing “a high level of market activity.”

But it’s the sudden positivity and excitement over power grid 2.0, that actually makes the economic downturn particularly frustrating. Companies have waited for years for the smart grid to be hot enough to excite consumers, investors, utilities and policymakers — who thought in 2008 that smart grid would get a Super Bowl ad and repeated mentions from the president? Hopefully the current recession won’t pull the rug out from under the industry in one of its shining moments.

Greentech Media has a column on the importance of standards as smart grids become more widespread - Smart Grid: A Matter of Standards.

How open should the smart grid's communication and networking infrastructure be? And what's the definition of "open" communications standards in the first place?

As a host of utilities and smart meter companies turn to companies to help them network millions of smart meters being deployed across the nation, these questions are coming to the fore.

Radio frequency mesh networks like those provided by smart meter makers Itron, Elster, Landis+Gyr and others – as well as the Internet protocol (IP)-based system from startup Silver Spring Networks – are coming under indirect criticism for their lack of openness by companies like Trilliant, which provide communications based on the ZigBee standard, or SmartSynch, which uses cellular networks from providers like AT&T.

At the same time, Eka Systems, which has developed its own smart meter data communications and networking technology, says that companies like Silver Spring Networks that have built IP networking systems are settling on a standard that, while open, will lead to problems with increasingly complex data communications needs to come in the future.

Who's right – or perhaps more importantly, which point of view utilities and regulators adopt – could play a big role in who succeeds in the emerging smart grid industry.

The subject is a hotly discussed one at the DistribuTech conference in San Diego this week, when companies spanning the reach of the smart grid meet to ply their wares and state the case for their technologies