Utility Goals for Smart Grid Depend on Better Communications
Communications is playing a bigger role for electric utilities as they move to a smarter grid, Vivian Bouet, chief information officer at San Antonio’s CPS Energy, told the Utilities Technology Council virtual conference on its final day Thursday. UTC also took a deep dive in a panel on a project by Central Virginia Electric Cooperative (CVEC) to bring fiber service to its customers.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
People want clean energy, Bouet said. “That means the grid, and how we manage the grid … needs to be more intelligent,” she said. “It needs to be more mobile.” Utilities are “wrestling with legacy systems,” she said: “How do we modernize that?”
Going digital has to be more than superficial, Bouet said. “Digital transformation is taking a step back, looking at what we do and fundamentally reimagining what that looks like.” That requires getting close to customers but also a huge amount of data that needs to be secured, she said. The pandemic has driven the transformation and forced changes to occur much faster than they would have otherwise, she said. That’s especially true for San Antonio, a COVID-19 hot spot, she said.
CVEC got started with a goal of meeting customer expectations “and their desire for services beyond electricity,” said CEO Gary Wood. Fiber also helps the co-op track data from customers “every few minutes versus once a day or once a month,” he said. CVEC offered dial-up internet from 1997 to 2008, he said: “When the internet was still first growing … we and our members were behind the curve.”
CVEC explored broadband over power line, Wood said. “That turned out to work a little better in the laboratory than it did on the power lines in the field.” CVEC tried to find a partner to offer broadband, agreeing to waive pole rental fees, he said: “We got no responders.” Eventually, the co-op made a $127 million commitment to build a fiber network, which it hopes to do in four years, he said. COVID-19 led CVEC to speed up deployment, he said. The utility’s projected take-rate was 35% and it’s seeing 50-75%, he said. “We’re building in areas where customers have few options.”
Douglas Dowling, CommScope director-sales and business development, said rural fiber networks like the one CVEC is building are inherently different from urban networks and require a different design. Urban customers usually have two or three options for broadband, he said. CVEC has an average of eight subscribers per mile, compared with more than 200 in a city, he said. Urban take-rates are usually much lower, while rural providers can sign up as many as 75% of potential customers, he said. Rural providers also are usually more flexible and will sign up subscribers whenever they want service and tend to have more above-ground connections, he said.
Some utilities will lean on the citizens broadband radio service band, while others will rely on the 900 MHz and other bands, said Dewey Day, Pacific Gas & Electric senior telecom engineer, on another panel. Utilities, led by Southern California Edison, were among the bidders in the CBRS auction (see 2009020057).
“It’s really more about the applicability of that spectrum to your geographic territory and coverage needs,” Dewey said. A CBRS site covers less territory than the 900 MHz band already used by utilities, he said. “You’re looking at some more sites, some more takeout points, more backhaul locations.”
CBRS might prove to be “a complement” to other spectrum, said John Hughes, Ameren director IT network engineering and operations. In tests of the 3.5 GHz band, the utility found its coverage extended 17 miles “in the flat prairies of Illinois,” he said. “There are going to be use cases where it’s applicable. It’s just a matter of economics and how many sites do you want to build.”
Ameren uses 900 MHz as its “base” spectrum, Hughes said. “We think that’s going to cover the majority of our fixed assets across two states and carry some of mobile needs such as push to talk,” he said: “We don’t think it’s the only spectrum Ameren or other utilities would be dependent on.” In some pockets, Ameren will need lower latency and higher performance, he said.
Not every band “is fit for every use case,” said Liana Ault, Nokia energy innovation lead. “You really are going to have to weigh and look at what challenges are you trying to resolve and will it fit the bill,” she said: Utilities need to do research and RF planning “and really look and see what they’re trying to accomplish.”