CUB Tours PGE’s Salem Smart Power Center
Posted on July 23, 2013 by Kaylie Klein
Tags, Emerging Technologies, Utility Regulation
In May of this year, CUB spotted an offsite Public Meeting advertised on the Oregon Public Utility Commission calendar for “PGE Smart Grid.” The listing did not tie to any active docket. Curious, members of our regulatory team, including Catriona, Jaime, and Kaylie, decided to attend and see what was cooking. The Public Meeting turned out to be a tour of PGE’s Salem Smart Power Center organized specifically for Commissioners and their Staff. PGE was rather surprised to also see CUB walk through the door.
The $23 million Salem Smart Power Center is part of a five-year, $178 million, Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project (PNW-SGDP). The PNW-SGDP is the largest of sixteen smart grid demonstration projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Soon, the ARRA funding will run out and PGE may have to look for new funding sources to keep its part of the project running.
PGE’s 8,000-square-foot facility in southeast Salem is testing ways to store and efficiently integrate variable renewable energy sources (such as solar, wind, and demand response) into the grid. In addition, PGE is developing a micro-grid to serve about 500 of PGE’s Salem business and residential customers. Part of the Smart Grid pilot is to see if PGE can efficiently use stored battery power rather than buying expensive spot market* power at times of high demand.
The tour of the Smart Power Center began in the interpretive room with an introductory video about the project and then continued with a tour of the facility interior, including a look at the inverters, switch boards, and lithium-ion battery towers that power the project. The batteries, while lithium-ion, are more like your phone battery than they are like the Boeing Dreamliner airplane batteries, so there is less danger of fire; nonetheless, PGE’s safety precautions for the batteries are impressive. To get a sense of scale, assume that each lithium-ion battery, which itself is not much bigger than a car battery, displaces about 2,500 car batteries. In other words, the lithium-ion batteries at the PGE Smart Power Center are much denser than a car battery. These batteries store energy to run the micro-grid for up to thirty minutes. Standby generators a few blocks away, owned by the State of Oregon, also provide a back-up power source to the batteries in order to provide additional redundancy during the pilot to reduce the possibility of service interruptions to customers.
Other sources of power for the center include solar. In terms of integrating renewables, PGE works with Kettle Brand Chips’ 616-panel rooftop solar installation in order to bring solar energy into the micro-grid when it is most needed.
Thirty-five residential customers have also volunteered to allow PGE to briefly cycle their water heaters on and off in order to reduce electricity demand when usage and costs are high. Additionally, fifty-one commercial customers make up the demand response system. However, PGE does not yet have functioning two-way communication capability. Instead, PGE has to place phone calls to bring them online. CUB thinks two-way communication is vital to a functioning smart grid. Notwithstanding that issue, we are pleased to see PGE model new ways for the region to deploy smart grid technology. Tagging along for the tour was an interesting and informative look into the potential for a clean energy future.
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*The day-ahead market (spot market): A physical market where prices and amounts are based on supply and demand. Resulting prices and the overall amounts traded are made public. The spot market is a day ahead-market where bidding closes at noon for deliveries from midnight and 24 hours ahead.
04/04/17 | 2 Comments | CUB Tours PGE’s Salem Smart Power Center