Generac Grid Services Blog

In today’s fast-paced digital world, we are all constantly connected. Even the smart phone you carry has immeasurable reach, whether it is to specific people, to your work or home email, to your bank account, or even to tell you how late your public transportation is going to be. The modern-day customer wants access to information and extensive communication in all aspects of their lives. This is no different when we look at a utility’s customer base. Although electric utilities provide essential services to their customers, a two-way, continuously connected relationship is becoming more important to manage a reliable and efficient power system, benefiting both the utility and satisfying their customers’ needs.

Generally, customers are accustomed to a one-way relationship with their utility – they consume whatever power they need, when they need it, and they receive a bill at the end of the billing period. This is the traditional way customers think about their utilities (if they do at all). But today, there is significant value for both the customer and the utility in establishing a two-way information exchange.

A recent Enbala blog entry discusses energy efficiency, providing background and context on how it is traditionally viewed and how industry perspective on energy efficiency needs to be expanded. A more holistic approach to grid operation that utilizes state-of-the-art smart grid technologies would allow for further efficiency improvements to the overall power system – not just at the end user. Let’s look at more details on how intelligently managing the power usage of large electricity users can improve both generation and delivery efficiencies.

Energy storage is a hot topic in today’s electricity industry – thanks to the increasing amount of clean, renewable energy connecting to the grid to support our environment. Because of the variable and intermittent nature of renewable energy (wind solar), energy storage has become a sort of “holy grail” – grid operators are looking for ways to store the energy produced by these sources during the off peak. New and innovative storage technologies are coming to market in large numbers, but there is a type of cost-effective storage that certain utilities are already using, taking advantage of naturally occurring gravity and water.

Energy consumption is on the rise – it has been for several decades, and forecasts predict that this will continue into the foreseeable future. It will become an issue as this proceeds in the years to come.

New technologies continue to be developed and used to make our lives so much more productive, entertaining and fulfilling. Yet we live on a finite planet with finite resources. These technologies require energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. Emerging markets like China and India will continue to grow and surpass North America and Western Europe in energy consumption. This will increase prices as well as greenhouse gas emissions at a time when we need to make drastic emissions cuts to be confident in a comfortable future for our planet.

Today’s electrical power grid is over 100 years old, has been carefully designed and engineered and a number of operational standards have been developed to ensure a reliable electricity supply.

The Concepts Behind Traditional Power System Design

The system design was based on a few simple ideas:

• Electricity generation is centralized in relatively few locations, generated by large power plants that can be easily controlled as needed
• Utilities and electricity system operators continuously work to meet demand for electricity; and this demand is relatively outspread, occurs at random locations and varying magnitudes and traditionally, not easily controlled
• The power system is like a gravity-driven water system, where the power flows “downhill” to electricity users; it is designed to deliver high-quality electricity to every user under all but extreme conditions and this delivery is controlled, for the most part, at the generating station
• Energy generally flows in one direction in the distribution network – from the sources of supply to the electricity customers