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By Michael Reid, February 11, 2010

An interesting story in the Boulder Camera the other day: Smart Grid Costs Blow Up, PUC Orders More Transparency. The gist: Capital expenditures on SmartGridCity are two to three times original projections. Xcel Energy asked the Colorado Public Utilities Commission for permission to recover some of those unplanned costs from customers across Colorado. That permission was granted, but at a price: Xcel has been directed to file for a “Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity,” or CPCN, covering SmartGridCity. The CPCN will give the PUC a new level of oversight and control over the project — similar to what it has for other major investments, such as power plants and transmission lines.

The article didn’t draw any connection between these developments and the lack of progress on delivering the promised in-home energy management solutions. But it got me wondering whether cost and regulatory issues are causing Xcel to put the brakes on the project.

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By Michael Reid, January 24, 2010

Xcel Energy’s web portal for SmartGridCity participants has an analysis tool that’s supposed to help customers figure out how electricity is being used inside the home. My initial testing of this tool indicates that much more work on it is needed before it will be of value.

To show what I mean, I’ll first step through the input screens, where you’re asked some questions about your home and its major end-uses. Here’s the first screen:

I have only a minor quibble with this screen: Since the second input requests the  “Year Premises Built or Upgraded,” I would expect the answer field to take a year, rather than a duration (“20 years”).

On to the second screen:

My first complaint about this screen is that it asks for average thermostat settings. Shouldn’t the tool account for our automatic setback thermostat — say, by asking for day and night settings, or for hours per day on each setting?

In hindsight, perhaps I should have run a quick calculation to come up with our average settings. For heating, that would be 16 hours at 68 degrees and 8 hours at 60 degrees, for a weighted average of 65.3 degrees. But the tool should have run those numbers for me.

Note that it doesn’t ask me anything about the age or efficiency of our furnace and air conditioner. I would expect those to be important inputs for understanding our energy use.

The third screen:

“DLP TV”? What the heck is that? I had to Google those initials to find out that they stand for “Digital Light Processing,” a type of TV with rear-screen projection. This is a place where pop-help screens would be useful.

I had to think through the lighting choices — What does “Fluorescent 50″ mean? I decided that it probably means 50 percent of the lighting is fluorescent. We use compact fluorescents in most places in our house. I’d guess that, overall, our lighting is about 80 percent fluorescent, but the only choices available were “Fluorescent 50″ and “Fluorescent 100.”

Under the laundry appliances, one of the choices offered next to Clothes Dryer Type is “Energy Star” — but there is no such thing! Because most clothes dryers use about the same amount of energy, Energy Star does not label dryers.

The fourth screen:

Lacking a pool and a spa, I don’t have much to say about this screen. Perhaps I should go back and answer ‘Yes’ to see if it asks for details, such as whether the pool pump is on a timer and how the spa is heated.

That was the last input screen. So what do we get from those inputs? This bar chart:

which is really hard to read, and — worse news — doesn’t make sense.

The picture above is the actual size displayed.  When it first popped onto my screen, I tried looking for the various color-coded end-uses shown on the right. We have an electric range, which, when it’s running, probably uses more electricity than anything else in the house  — so where’s the green ‘Cooking’ segment on the bars? (Come to think of it, there was no question about whether we cook with electricity or gas. A big oversight, I believe.) And where’s the cooling load — is it really only in July in August, and just a tiny slice at that? Say, where’s refrigeration?

After puzzling over those issues, I noticed the even-bigger problem: Our electricity consumption does not drop to around 100 kWh in summer! The bar chart in my last post showed that we bottomed out last year at around 400 kWh for the month of May.

Something is very, very wrong here. I sure hope that Excel Energy and its portal contractor, GridPoint, are on the case.

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By Michael Reid, January 10, 2010

Finally! Three days ago Xcel Energy launched a web portal where SmartGridCity participants can view their energy usage and cost data. This was announced in an above-the-fold story in Friday’s Daily Camera with the headline, “Check power use in real time.” Cool!

I felt a bit let down when the article explained that data would be shown in 15-minute increments, which is close to real time. If we can’t see our usage with much greater granularity, it will be hard to use the data to understand the contribution of individual devices to our total load.

With that backdrop, I went online today to Xcel’s web site and signed up for access. It was easy, requiring not much more than account number and basic name/address/phone information.

Pretty quickly I was able to see graphs and tables of gas and electric costs and consumption. Here’s a graph of electricity usage over the past 24 months.

Then I drilled down to yesterday’s usage. Here’s a view of noon to 6 p.m.:

You can view a day either on a full 24-hour basis or in one of four six-hour periods.
Then on to today … and a rude surprise. Here’s the graph of midnight to 6 a.m. today:

What happened? Did my smart meter fail at 12:30 this morning? Perhaps Xcel’s server was down? I chalked it up to a shakedown period for the new system. But then I looked at the online version of the Daily Camera’s article from Friday. Right at the top is this addendum:

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to clarify that the 15-minute intervals of a home’s power use is catalogued and made available the next day online. Xcel Energy processes the data at midnight every day. Eventually, the company hopes to provide live updates throughout the day.

So my data isn’t missing after all … it’s just delayed by, um, up to 24 hours. Drat.

I moved on to explore the site’s tools for analyzing my usage. I’ll report on that experience in a future post.

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By Michael Reid, September 7, 2009

We had an energy audit done on our home the other day. It was well worth our time and the modest cost.

Our audit was provided by Lightly Treading, Inc., a contractor to Xcel Energy, and it was arranged through the Boulder-based Center for Resource Conservation. We opted for the deluxe version, which includes infrared analysis. The cost, subsidized by Xcel and payable on our utility bill, was just $120 — well below the going rate of $300 and up, according to an article in the current issue of Consumer Reports (subscription required).

Dave of Lightly Treading did an excellent job of explaining every step of the process and answering our many questions. We walked through the house room by room, noting conditions that affect comfort and usage. After making sure that every window and door was tightly closed, he set up a blower door (see photo below) in the front entryway. When powered up, a blower door sucks air from every corner of the house and uncovers gaps in the structure through which air rushes in to compensate for the pressure difference between the inside and outside.

In some places, such as the bottom of the door to our deck and around the sill of one set of windows, we could feel the inrush of air through leakage points. Caulking and new weatherstripping will take care of those. Generally, though, it seemed like our house is not too leaky (with one exception noted below).

With the infrared camera, Dave inspected our walls and cathedral ceilings, looking for temperature differentials that would be visible on the screen and that might be caused by leaks or missing insulation. He uncovered leaks around two skylights, one of which has been leaking water of late. The good news is that there was no detectable infiltration through our attic.

The lower level was another matter. The blower door was pulling a veritable gale-force wind through the hatch into our crawlspace. We’ll need to caulk leaks and improve the somewhat haphazard insulation around the crawlspace perimeter. Dave also recommended insulating the back of the crawlspace hatch.

Dave took inventory of our appliances and HVAC equipment, and I provided a variety of specs on the home, such as the square footage and the heating capacity of our gas furnace. He’ll crank those numbers through an analysis package to help develop a written audit report and list of recommended improvements, which we should have in a few days. I expect I’ll have more to say when those results are in hand.

Assemblng the blower door

The blower dooer gauges the rate of air infiltration

Scanning our high ceilings for gaps in insulation

Inspecting the crawl space -- our biggest problem area

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By Michael Reid, August 19, 2009

As I have written in previous posts, we’re still waiting on the home energy management tools that have been promised as part of the smart grid in Boulder. An article in the Maryland Daily Record about key SmartGridCity partner Current Group suggests that the focus of the project may be shifting away from the customer side of the meter:

[Current Group President and Chief Operating Officer Ray] Gogel said that the focus on the home, at the edge of the grid, might not be the best approach. SmartGridCity has only implemented smart meters in half of the 50,000 homes participating, because the companies are not sure if they are worthwhile.

Apparently Current Group is more bullish on the opportunities in power distribution — that is, in using smart-grid technologies to improve the management of the wires and transformers that deliver power.

I don’t doubt that the upstream benefits of the smart grid are important. But what happens on the customer side of the meter is important, too. SmartGridCity has been held out as trial of technologies that will revolutionize customers’ relationship with energy. I hope Xcel Energy doesn’t lose sight of that purpose.

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By Michael Reid, August 16, 2009

In my previous post I wrote about Xcel Energy’s Saver’s Switch program, which in its current form is a not-so-smart system for reducing air-conditioning load during peak summer hours. I’m hoping that SmartGridCity will include an enhanced version of this program.

In the meantime, while we wait for the promised tools and benefits of the smart grid pilot, I thought I’d comment on Xcel’s approach to marketing Saver’s Switch. The images in this post are from a flyer and newsletter, both of which were included in our July 2009 utility bill. Somehow Xcel’s copywriters think that this program will help participants “beat the heat” and “stay cool” — when, in fact, it’s likely to reduce occupants’ comfort on a hot day.

This approach strikes me as really odd. We’re willing participants in this program, in spite of the mild discomfort it causes for my household, because we value the greater good of reducing the need for peak generating capacity — plus, the $40 incentive is a nice benefit. Why Xcel casts this program as something that improves your air conditioning is a mystery.

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By Michael Reid, August 9, 2009

In our neighborhood, built out in the 1980s, central air conditioning is standard. Some people seem to have theirs running all the time in the summer. We try to minimize the use of ours, generally preferring open windows and fans. But we give in on the hottest days.

A few weeks ago, we turned on the AC one afternoon when the indoor temperature was in the mid-80s. But hours later the temperature was stuck at 83, even though the AC was set at 78.

A pager network (remember pagers?) sends a signal to the box at the upper left when Xcel wants to cycle our air conditioner.

Was the AC broken? Not exactly. Its ability to cool was being curbed by Saver’s Switch. This Xcel Energy program gives the utility partial control of air conditioner. On hot summer days, when demand for power is peaking, Xcel can send a pager signal to a box attached to our air conditioner’s compressor, cycling it on and off a few times per hour. They promise to do this no more than 15 times a year. In return, Xcel will give us a $40 credit on our October bill (up from the $25 credit of previous years).

The trouble with Saver’s Switch is that the underlying technology is not terribly smart. It just switches the AC on and off without any knowledge of what’s happening to the temperature inside our house. In effect, Xcel has to guess at how much discomfort its customers will tolerate.

I’m hoping the smart grid project will change this. A smarter AC control program would communicate directly with our thermostat and do some or all of the following:

• Adjust the cycling strategy on the fly to ensure that the indoor temperature does not exceed a pre-set limit.
• Warn us in advance (via email, text message, or phone call) of a likely cycling event, so that we could choose to pre-cool the house down to a lower temperature.
• Give us an option to override the control period — something we might want to do on occasion, even if it meant forfeiting some of the $40 incentive.
• Keep us informed on how much energy and money we’re saving, as well as how our participation is helping to reduce Colorado’s need for new generating capacity.

When I applied for a slot in the SmartGridCity pilot, Xcel asked if I would be willing to let them install a new thermostat in my home. I’d be fine with that — especially if it’s one that can help make Saver’s Switch a more customer-friendly program.

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By Michael Reid, August 1, 2009

Many smart-grid projects under development around the U.S. use two-way wireless communications between electric meters and pole-mounted radio boxes. But Boulder’s SmartGridCity project is based on a technology known as broadband over power line (BPL), which transmits signals through ordinary electric wires.

BPL allows Xcel Energy to read smart meters remotely and do lots of other useful things, like starting or stopping electric service at a smart meter-equipped address without dispatching a truck to the site, and monitoring the health of its transformers. But BPL need not stop at the meter — it can enable communications through the meter on into the home, and vice versa. Eventually, smart home electronics and appliances should be able to respond to utility signals so that, for example, your dishwasher’s wash cycle could be delayed automatically when power is in short supply.

As the “broadband” part of its name suggests, BPL is capable of much more. A few years ago, some electric utilities were bullish on using BPL to provide high-speed internet service. BPL systems providing internet access to homes and businesses were created in Manassas, Virginia, Cincinnati, Ohio, Dallas, Texas, and a few other places. BPL provided, in effect, a high-speed data port at every electric outlet. But there were technical challenges – most notably, interference with amateur radio (“ham radio”) frequencies – and it wasn’t clear that BPL would prove cost-competitive with other broadband internet services.

Today, BPL’s future as an internet solution is unclear. The municipally-owned Manassas system is struggling. In Dallas, internet service over the system has ended, and it will be used only for smart-grid purposes. But there are signs of renewed interest in BPL, especially for serving up the internet to rural areas, and IBM is among the backers of recently announced projects.

Last year I asked a representative of Xcel Energy whether BPL-based internet could be in Boulder’s future, and the answer, to paraphrase, was, “We’re a power company, not a telecom company.” Prudence may dictate reserving most of the system’s bandwidth for future utility needs. And it would be complicated from a regulatory standpoint to layer an unregulated internet business on top of Xcel’s regulated electricity business.

Still, the possibility is intriguing. Comcast and Qwest currently split the internet service market in Boulder. Having a third competitor could only be good for consumers. I’d sure like to give it a try.

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By Michael Reid, July 26, 2009

Xcel Energy installed our smart meter a few months ago. It happened with little fanfare. Crews were working in our neighborhood for a few days. Some time after that, I walked around to the side of the house and saw our new digital meter. The change-out happened without our noticing exactly when it took place.

The new meter fit in the existing meter cabinet and, at a glance, doesn’t look all that different except for the digital display. It bears three company names: Xcel Energy; Landis & Gyr, the meter manufacturer; and Current Group, which provides the key communications technology undergirding the SmartGridCity project. I’ll have more to say about that technology in later posts.

What do we do with our smart meter? So far, nothing! Xcel has not yet given us access to our meter data. I expect that access will come, at a minimum, through a web browser where we’ll be able to see our energy usage and costs as well as an estimate of our carbon footprint.

If we’re lucky, perhaps Xcel will give us an in-home energy display to try out. Having a display that sits somewhere prominent — say, on the kitchen counter — and runs all the time should create more awareness of our usage than if we have to remember to load a bookmarked page in Firefox.