Naperville City Council Endorses Smart Grid Initiative

http://www.naperville.il.us/dynamic_content.aspx?id=16294

At its December 7, 2009, workshop, the Naperville City Council endorsed Naperville’s Smart Grid Initiative and committed financial support for the city to match an approximate $11 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to install the smart grid. This action allows the city to move forward with negotiating and finalizing the award for final City Council approval in January 2010.

The City of Naperville is the only municipality in the State of Illinois selected for a Smart Grid grant by the U.S. Department of Energy and was selected from more than 500 applicants.
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“The future of power has arrived in Naperville, and it is in the form of a smart electric grid,” said Naperville Mayor A. George Pradel. “This is an exciting opportunity for residents and businesses to directly monitor their energy usage and adjust their consumption accordingly. With our electric utility customers empowered to directly control how and when they use energy, we will lower demand on our grid, thus driving down Naperville’s cost of purchasing energy on the wholesale market. There is a potential net benefit for the city of $81 million over the next 15 years!”

The press conference is being held with the Galvin Electricity Initiative, which is conducting a case study to demonstrate how community-based smart grid projects like the Naperville Smart Grid Initiative maximize efficiency and reliability — and meet many of the Galvin Electricity Initiative’s criteria for Perfect Power. The Galvin Initiative will focus on the smart distribution system that Naperville has systematically built over the past 15 years, the electric utility foresight in developing an innovative plan and its commitment to continuous improvement and high reliability while reducing the cost of energy to residential and business customers.

Naperville’s smart grid project will include:
* Complete automation of the city’s electric grid, which will provide automatic, computerized meter readings. This will enhance system efficiency and reliability, streamline customer billing and increase billing accuracy.
* The addition of more than 57,000 smart meters will allow residents and businesses to analyze and adjust their energy usage patterns, thus conserving energy and controlling consumption and costs.
* Based on the availability of real-time feedback, the Department of Public Utilities will increase utility reliability and support two-way communication flow between the customer and the utility.
* Through a better understanding of utility demand and usage, pricing can be lowered accordingly.
* The smart grid will also serve as the initial infrastructure to support electric car usage for the average household.
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Other utilities are rolling out smart meters in the Chicago region. ComEd has begun installing 130,000 smart meters. … The number of smart meters in the United States is projected to rise to 13.6 million next year from 8 million in 2009, and to more than 33 million by 2011, according to the research company Park Associates.

Unlike traditional electricity meters, smart meters can measure how much energy a customers uses and when it is being used. That allows utilities to charge varying prices, based on season and time of day, and to reward customers who adjust their electricity use accordingly.

For example, on steamy summer afternoons, when wholesale electricity prices spike with peak demand, customers could use smart meters to set new, smart appliances to run at night when demand — and prices — are lower. Naperville officials estimate that such measures could eventually save customers 5 percent to 15 percent…. A more efficient energy grid could lead utilities to build fewer power plants.

Consumer advocates agreed that smart meters hold great promise, but they are monitoring their deployment closely.

“We think a well-designed smart grid can be good for consumers,” said David Kolata, director of the Chicago-based Citizens Utility Board, “but there are some policy questions to work through.”

Among them is how customers are billed. Smart meters are supposed to make billing more accurate, but more than 100 frustrated Pacific Gas & Electric customers packed a hearing in Fresno, Calif., in October, alleging the utility’s smart meters caused their bills to spike unnecessarily.

Pacific Gas & Electric attributed the increase to summer heat and to rate increases approved by the California Public Utilities Commission. The utility was forced by a lawsuit to suspend its deployment of smart meters among its residential customers.

Naperville has yet to develop a rate structure for pricing energy by the hour, but the city’s public utilities director, Alan Poole, said he was confident the city could service its debt without raising electricity rates. ComEd officials said customers with smart meters will see a $5-a-year increase starting in 2010 to fund the utility’s $69 million program.

…Others worry about the wide array of personal data collected by smart meters. Leslie Harris, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the devices present a set of unresolved privacy issues by collecting 750 to 3,000 data points each month.

These data, she said, can include detailed information on when customers eat, work and sleep and could fall into the hands advertisers, marketers, law enforcement agents or criminals. Harris said utilities need a more public airing of what data they collect, why they collect it and how long they will keep it. “For them to say ‘Trust us; we’re not going to share data in identifiable form’ is really not good enough,” she said. “They have to have some mindfulness that they are now in the personal-data collection business.”

The City of Naperville www.naperville.il.us
Media Release dated December 11, 2009
and
“Naperville prepares to roll out ’smart’ electricity meters”
By Gerry Smith
The Chicago Tribune www.ChicagoTribune.com
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-smart-meters-bddec27,0,5829293.story
December 27, 2009

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