People have been asking "what's a Smart Grid good for?" The big answer is that the smart electrical grid will enable a significant shift away from expensive, insecure imported oil to cheaper and cleaner electricity generated from reliable fuels. The Smart Grid will give consumers and industry much better control of total energy costs than we have today.
But this is a true story about how the Smart Grid helped save our vacation house from freezing while we were away.
We get our electricity in South Hero from Vermont Electric Coop, one of the first utilities in the US to install smart (digital) electric meters. They have developed a web application called wattWATCHERS which lets me see a graph of my daily or hourly electrical use. The snip from the chart pictured here is hourly for a week.
We heat this house with a geothermal or ground source heat pump; with electricity at $.17/kwh, the pump delivers heat at a price equivalent to $1.70/gallon fuel oil. The compressor in the heat pump dominates energy use in the house. You can plainly see the spikes every couple of hours on the left as the pump kicks in to warm the place.
But a capacitor in the heat pump blew. It kept trying to get itself going but couldn't. You can see the near flatline of electrical usage on the right side of the graph. More importantly, I could see that something was wrong and get help to the house before any damage was caused by loss of the heat pump (there is backup propane heat). Without the Smart Grid, I would've had no clue that anything was wrong until next time we visited the house. Even the monthly bill received much later wouldn't have been much help; the wounded pump was using as much total electricity per day in its attempts to restart as it did when it was working; the PATTERN of usage clearly visible on the graph was the needed alarm.
BTW, being a nerd, I monitor temperatures in the house over the net though the security system. But 1) the propane backup was keeping temperatures up as long as it had fuel; 2) an unrelated IP problem had temporarily cut me off. I needed the Smart Grid which is independent data path into my house.
Smart Grid, among other things, is a house sitter.
Related posts:
The SmartGrid is the Internet of Energy
Smart Energy Use – The Hybrid-Electric House