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Cover Story Smart Grid for industrial disciplines

Smart Grid is certainly a new buzzword in industrial circles. As with every previous initiative good and bad, it requires a bit of education to get to the point where you understand how you can implement it in a way that does more than go through the motions and creates immediate and sustainable improvement.

With Smart Grid, you hear terms like Smart Generation, Smart Storage, Cyber Security, Smart Distribution, Smart Consumption, Demand Response, Alternative Energy Sources, Meter Data Management, and Micro Grids. In industry, we tend to speak in terms like, Capital Equipment, Inventory, Labor Efficiency, Lean Manufacturing, Takt Time, Overtime Premium, Bottlenecks.

It is confusing. When I became involved in my first supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) applications, I was also confused and scared to death of the secret technology. After a short time, I remember telling one of my high-school buddies who was a computer programmer that it was not as complicated and magical as I had thought. I remember him saying: “Now that you are on the inside, you can’t tell anyone.”

Let me take some time to remove your fear of Smart Grid and bring you to the inside.

Line balancing and Takt time

For the readers that have assembly lines, you certainly practice line balancing. You don’t allow one station of the line to have 3-4 times the load of the other stations. When you find this, you move load from one station to another. I would equate each station to an hour in the utilities day.

You probably also have variability in the standard hours by product line. When you have non standard operations, you take them offline or add temporary capacity to that workstation. Similarly, the utility can either fire up expensive peaker plants or shed the load to another period. The challenge for them is they need you to cooperate if they want to shed load.

Some of the manufacturing people reading this will recall Eli Goldratt’s first book The Goal . One of his messages was improvement of $1 in a bottleneck was worth tens or hundreds of dollars of value through the entire system. We now realize the entire system for our energy delivery encompasses Generation and Consumption. If you try to sub-optimize one or the other, you do not get the synergy that is Smart Grid. The utility can not get access to the entire system benefits without your participation.