North Carolina-based Duke Energy (News - Alert) this week released a white paper describing its “vision for a connected, end-to-end digital grid” that will create “a sustainable energy future” while working to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by 50 percent by 2030.
The paper has catapulted Duke Energy into a thought-leader position in the industry and has buffed up its environmental credentials. In March, Duke and its partner Areva, a French energy company, canceled plans for a biomass plant in Washington State and suspended plans for any construction “in the face of low demand for biomass energy.”
According to the paper’s author, Duke Energy’s Manager of Technology Development, David Masters, “A digital power grid enabled by an open communications network will allow us to meet our nation’s continually growing energy needs in a sustainable way.
“What’s more,” he said, “this system would allow us to integrate technologies that have already proven effective in other industries in a way that is both flexible and scalable. Utilizing this technology in our grid could significantly improve energy efficiency, reliability, and affordability of data.”
Duke, which services five states in the Southeast, already has deployed a smart grid infrastructure in Ohio comprising about 600,000 meters— including roughly 230,000 smart electric meters, 165,250 smart gas meters, and 43,759 communication nodes along the wires.
The new smart grid strategy outlined in Duke Energy: Developing the Communications Platform to Enable a More Intelligent Electric Grid supports the approach taken in that pilot market. The company will build its digital grid architecture around local communications nodes that will transmit, aggregate, and “manage the deluge of data.”
In effect, local communications nodes will “perform triage” on incoming data to prioritize and route information. The data will then be:
- Analyzed locally—to react in real time to events that could affect the customer, reduce traffic on the grid, and provide a more holistic overview of the community environment ;
- Routed back to a centralized location for action; or
- Sent to other nodes on the distribution grid that may be in a key location for further analysis and action.
In this way, backhaul data on distribution management, mobile workforce, plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), smart metering, and customer energy management can be handled more efficiently and securely. At a technical level, the communications node provides a physical and logical link between wide area networks, distribution assets, and end points; as well as consumers’ in-building networks and energy components (e.g., smart meters). It provides a single point of access for multiple organizations and systems to gather information and data from a variety of distribution and customer premise equipment.
Masters said he hopes a national smart grid—one that enables greater incorporation of renewables and electric vehicles and that deploys "millions of devices on the power grid and in the home"—is not too far in the future.
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Cheryl Kaften is an accomplished communicator who has written for consumer and corporate audiences. She has worked extensively for MasterCard (News - Alert) Worldwide, Philip Morris USA (Altria), and KPMG, and has consulted for Estee Lauder and the Philadelphia Inquirer Newspapers. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
