New Hampshire Utilities At Different Stages Regarding the "Smart Grid"

The promise of a “smart grid” is seductive.

With the right kind of electric meter and access to a website, homeowners could monitor their electric use.

They could make informed decisions that could help lower their use and their costs.

New Hampshire Public Utilities Commissioner… Clifton Below.

The idea with home area network is that you could control devices in the home whether it’s your electric hot water heater or your dryer or your dishwasher so they would use energy at times when it’s less expensive and actually often less expensive to produce….
Some electric consumers in New Hampshire already have these ‘smart meters’.

Unitil has installed them on homes.

But more and more will likely get them.
New Hampshire Electric Coop is planning to install smart meters for their customers in the next two or three years.

Like other utilities the Co-op charges residential customers flat rates for electricity, no matter when they use it.

But the smart grid would allow customers to take advantage of different rates depending on the time of the day.

Spokesman Seth Wheeler says the idea is to coax customers to schedule activities like washing clothes to hours when it’s less expensive.

Ideally electricity is going to cost less. And you’re going to use it a later hour which helps manage the load across the system. Again so there’s no need for that extra peaking generation plant to come on to emit the carbon that it’s going to emit just to meet a peak demand that occurs for a few hours of the day.

But while Unitil and the Co-op are pressing ahead with smart meters, Public Service of New Hampshire, the state’s biggest utility is taking it slow.

PSNH Spokesman Martin Murray says the company is not sure it wants to install smart grid meters for residential customers.

On the residential side the estimated cost of replacing all of our residential customers existing meters with so called smart meters would be a cost of 50 to 60 million dollars.

PSNH’s parent company, Northeast Utilities, has installed smart meters for some customers as part of a pilot program in Connecticut.

Murray says PSNH will look at that program’s results to help them and regulators determine if making the investment is worthwhile.

Before investing that sort of money, obviously the state is very interested in being in being as sure as it possibly can be of what the benefit to customers will be.

Consumers aren’t the only ones who could save money and increase efficiency with a smart grid.

PUC Commissioner Cliff Below says the utilities themselves could also cut costs.

If you add devices that monitor use and communicate back to a control room what the voltage is and actually in many cases you may be able to lower the voltage which actually means there’s less line losses. You’re not wasting as much energy to get the job done.

One resource all the utilities will need for smart meters and other technologies is lots of money.

That could come from ratepayers, but some could also come from federal stimulus funding.

The regional grid operator, ISO-New England is also looking toward making electric delivery more efficient and adaptable.

Vamsi Chadalavada of ISO New England says the company already handles about 400 traditional power plants.

But he says, a smart grid would make it possible to handle thousands of wind, solar and biomass producers.

What it does is it allows us to bring in renewable, allows us to bring in distributed resources and allows us to pick the most economic and most optimal set of resources, if you will, to meet the demand and ultimately that’s a more efficient way for us to use society’s resources and should benefit all of us in new England.

In New Hampshire, Unitil is looking for ways to get more solar and wind power into its service territory.

For instance, Senior Vice President George Gantz says the company is considering putting solar arrays and wind turbines on some customers’ properties.

Having lots of small scale local generators on customer premises is going to require control technologies and monitoring and measurement techniques on the utility systems that are also part of this smart grid process.

Gantz says if Unitil is going to move forward with that kind of plan, it’s going to need the kind of technology promised by the smart grid.