February 24, 2010

The Galvin Electricity Initiative plans to this year roll out a standard set of performance metrics for smart grids plus a related seal of approval, Deputy Director John Kelly told us yesterday.

          “It's almost a LEED [Leadership Environmental Energy Design] program for the grid,” he added.  “LEED set an established set of performance criteria so that buildings could be compared.  It's sort of a peer-to-peer look.  So we're looking at 10 performance criteria that could be used to rank grids, micro grids, across the country.

          “With LEED right now, you can get a certain number of points out of 100, so we'd have a top score of 100 and the top utilities would be 85-100,” Kelly said.  “You'd have a way to compare and score utilities on their performance.”

          Galvin is likely to provide methods that will let utility firm executives apply the criteria to their firms even if they don't want to pursue a seal of approval with the nonprofit Galvin, he added.  LEED was developed by another nonprofit called the US Green Building Council.

          “We don't see utilities setting specific [smart grid] goals -- to, say, drop their SAIFI [system average interruption frequency index] and SAIDI [system average interruption duration index] by 50%,” said Kelly.  SAIFI and SAIDI are the common measures of reliability performance.  “Utilities say smart grids will improve reliability but what's missing is a commitment to produce a specific improvement.”

          With specific measures established, public utility commissioners “can start to ask utilities, ‘What performance improvement in these metrics are you going to gain?'” he said.

          Possible performance criteria include environmental, aesthetics and cost.  Galvin is vetting ideas now for the metrics with some public utility commissioners.

          Environmental performance measures could include as factors: carbon intensity, fossil fuel source energy intensity and percentage of renewables.  Aesthetics could include as a factor getting the system underground.  “We're trying to rank the grid based on what communities and consumers have asked for,” Kelly noted.

          “Repairs is not something we've seen many utilities measure,” Kelly said.  “We think [cost] is an extremely important metric.  If you look at the private sector, waste is something we're always trying to get rid of.  If you can eliminate waste, it pays for itself.”

          Some utilities might be spending $50 million/year to put back up distribution systems that are being knocked down by ice storms, wind, tornados or thunderstorms, but the cost often goes unmeasured, he added.

          Galvin plans to this year apply the metrics to some micro grids such as the one in Naperville, Ill, to test them out.

          “We should be measuring performance at the community level,” Kelly said.  “Utilities measure at the overall system level.  Well, you could have a city that has power reliability that's three or four times worse than the average.  So an average SAIFI for a whole utility doesn't really give you a picture of how each community's power is.  When we talk about micro grid, it's a city or any community served by a utility.  Therefore, we really believe these metrics should be reported at the community level, so the mayor sees the performance of the grid that's supplying power to his constituents.”

          Galvin will encourage states to come out with their own set of performance metrics.  “We don't want to force people into our methodology,” said Kelly.