America needs smart grid investments pronto, stakeholders say at NARUC event
BALTIMORE — Two essential elements for developing a smart city are an integrated communications platform and a dynamic resilient grid, said David K. Owens, the former executive vice president of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI).
“Smart cities cannot happen without them,” Owens told Daily Energy Insider following a Nov. 14 session he participated in at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) 129th Annual Meeting and Education Conference held here. “These two pillars drive it all.”
And “they require huge investments,” said Owens, who retired in June after 36 years with EEI, which represents investor-owned electric companies.
Owens was among several participants who discussed smart communities and infrastructure in the context of creating a joint focus among industry, stakeholders, regulators and policymakers around making investments now that ‘smarten’ America’s electricity infrastructure via advanced technologies.
Smart cities are loosely defined as being those that have made investments in human and social capital, transportation and communication infrastructure toward improving their citizens’ quality of life, while also managing natural resources, keeping the environment clean, growing the economy and applying smart solutions via advanced technologies to get it all accomplished.
“When I think about a smart community or a smart city,” Owens said, “I think about how you empower customers to make decisions and to have more flexibility and control” over their use of electricity, gas, communications and water by giving them active voices.
It’s also about giving customers the opportunity to reach their sustainability goals, Owens said.
Regulators, Owens suggested, should spark collaboration with a variety of players, including industries across electricity, transportation and technology, among others, and engage them as partners to work toward developing smart cities that use advanced technologies and distributed resources.
Ready, willing and able to partner is Pepco, according to Donna Cooper, president of Washington, D.C.-based Pepco Region at Pepco Holdings Inc., a subsidiary of Exelon Corp.
“We want to be a partner” in such projects, said Cooper, “and we want to be a thought leader.”
Pepco, which serves 840,000 customers, Cooper said, literally “touches everyone within the community in which we operate. Advanced technologies are changing the way we interface and interact with our customers.” They are something the company embraces, she said.
Previously, Cooper said what once was a diverse group of stakeholders having diverging interests now are coming together in the smart city movement as they work toward utilizing a smarter electric grid far beyond its initial intentions.
So as more innovation leads to more customer solutions and more partnerships, the consideration then becomes how to best make the transition to a smarter grid both reliably and affordably, said Brigham McCown, president and CEO of Nouveau Inc., a consulting firm, and founder of the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure.
In McCown’s opinion, the best way forward is by making early and earnest investments in grid-related infrastructure and technology.
“We are in a really unique, transformative time,” he said, with opportunities and challenges arising that are related to transforming the grid to enable smart cities and communities. Federal and state officials and electricity sector stakeholders must plan for and make investment decisions now about what advanced technologies to purchase and deploy, McCown said.
At the same time, public policies should address state and national solutions for how to join the disparate smart cities and smart communities into one whole smart nation, he added.
Like Pepco, tech provider Itron Inc. has made investments that have brought together an array of players across 10 cities seeking to ramp up operations, said Itron President and Chief Executive Philip Mezey.
“The next step is business innovation and determining how do we charge or share the costs for improving this infrastructure,” Mezey said. “The technology is largely in place, so now how do we contract and share these costs?”
That, panel participants agreed, is currently the billion-dollar question.
