If you missed PJM’s Grid 20/20 Forum in person, you can now see and hear the speakers’ presentations in a video recording.

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A market-oriented regulatory environment facilitates new technologies for the energy future, according to the panel of experts addressing, “Investing in Our Energy Future.”

Panel 4: Investing in Our Energy Future

Panelists discussed their visions for the energy business of the future, with nearly all agreeing that the marriage of energy technology with information technology will be a major driver. Panelists also underscored that the market provides the opportunities for expanded demand resources, energy efficiency programs and prices to devices programs.

“We are at the beginning of a major energy transformation,” said Lisa Wood, executive director of the Institute for Electric Efficiency (IEE), who facilitated the panel. She noted that the old models of one-way flow of power will not work, supply and demand are shifting, and energy is going to have to be cleaner and greener going forward.

Val Jensen
Val Jensen, vice president for ComEd, who manages the utility’s customer-side initiatives such as its demand response and energy efficiency programs, said that recent legislation is changing how his company will invest in the future.

The Illinois legislation, enabling $3 billion in infrastructure modernization, creates a more stable investment platform with more certainty, Jensen said. Nobody can be against infrastructure modernization and technology anymore, he said. “It’s like saying puppies and small children aren’t cute.”

Paul Centolella
Paul Centolella, of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, said prices to devices—the real time electricity pricing information available to end-users—is the key to the future and what should drive future investment.

“How can we take advantage of these intelligent devices using their built-in ability to communicate,” Centollella said, “is what the industry should be addressing. If we do that, we can make the grid operate more efficiently.”

Chris Thomas
Removing the barriers to demand response—both wholesale barriers and perceived barriers in consumers’ minds—is what is needed for building more aggressive demand response programs in the future, according to Chris Thomas, director of policy, Citizens Utility Board.

Currently, the Citizens Utility Board offers a call center and tools that help consumers evaluate their energy efficiency and recommends ways to be more efficient.

Ron Dizy
As stewards of the energy system, it makes sense to use stuff that already exists, said Ron Dizy, president and CEO of ENBALA Power Networks. His company, a demand response company, already uses loads in a meaningful way but he said there’s an opportunity to do much more with technology.

“I don’t think the information technology part is the biggest challenge. It is controlling the load,” he said.

Daniel Byrd

Daniel Byrd, co-founder of Progressive Energy Group, is working to get financing for infrastructure investment. His consulting firm specializes in renewable energy and energy efficiency (RE/EE). Progressive Energy provides strategic market and business strategy consulting and helps raise capital for projects and corporate finance through relationships with investors.

Currently, his firm is working on a small-scale pilot with the intention of getting $100-200 million in loan volume for start-up projects in the energy industry.

Ed Murrell

Tomorrow’s energy needs can be well served by current energy regulatory policy, said Ed Murrell, a director with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), because regulations are based on a market-oriented model.

“On the wholesale level, markets make it easier to see new ways to do things and provide transparency,” Murrell said.

Murrell also noted that the marketplace is taking a greater role in transmission investment but more transmission will be needed to integrate renewable energy.

Paul Centolella

Paul Centolella, commissioner with the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, moderated the discussion on how the grid will be managed in the future.

The international panel reviewed a number of different models and perspectives with the common theme of research and testing of new technologies being keys to the grid of the future.

Panel: Managing Grid Operations

Wayne Longcore, chief energy solutions expert – SAP, reviewed six imperatives driving the grid of the future, including Smart Grid disruption, increased utility tools and the sustainability challenge.

He said there is a shift toward less controllability on the generation side as supply shifts to renewable energy, where output is controlled by Mother Nature.

Lauren Schmitt, vice president of smart grid solutions – Alstom Grid, discussed several Smart Grid projects underway in Europe. Specifically, Alstom is researching and testing city energy and transportation management systems.

It’s an evolution, he said. As an industry, we are redefining how the grid will get balanced. Schmitt said the grid of future will be balanced through microgrids and clusters.

He discussed physical grid architecture and said the future grid is evolving toward hybrid AC/DC systems.

Hong-beom Jeon

Hong-beom Jeon, senior vice president of the Smart Green Development Center for KT shared several Smart Grid developments underway in Korea.

On Sept. 15 of this year, consumption in Korea was high necessitating rolling blackouts to ward off a nationwide blackout. The rolling blackouts lasted five hours. Smart Grid is a very important concept to decrease consumption in Korea he said. The goal of Korea’s Smart Grid projects is to reduce consumption in Korea by 10 percent (at peak) and increase renewable resources by 11 percent both by 2030.

Korea also has a smart meter deployment plan with a goal of nationwide deployment by 2020—meter deployments in 17,370,000 households.

Jeju Island, a Smart Grid test bed, is focusing on homes, transportation, renewable energy through a variety of research projects. Home energy efficiency tests are underway with 605 households participating in a KT smart home pilot. The pilot integrates smart appliances with television-integrated visualization tools. The interim results of the home energy efficiency tests show a 10.9 percent reduction in the power consumption.

Stu Bresler

Stu Bresler, PJM”s vice president of Market Operations & Demand Resource, said reliable grid operations are the core of PJM’s markets.

“We don’t operate markets for the sake of posting prices,” he continued. We operate markets to provide the financial incentives for physical asset owners to support reliable operations.

Sound market design enables innovation in energy services and strengthens reliability, he said. The latest example of market evolution is the recent announcement of two demand resource providers participating in PJM’s Regulation Market.

Thomas O’Brien, executive director of Information and Technology Services at PJM, said IT needs to enable the “food chain” of the Smart Grid, from generation and transmission to the customer.

Thomas O’Brien

He also discussed the importance of building security into grid architecture. He said security is analogous to table stakes in a poker game: You can’t even show up until you have built in security.

With regard to Smart Grid industry standards, O’Brien said there needs to be a dynamic iteration between pilot implementations and standards development—you can’t have one without the other. He also noted there’s a tricky balance between being too prescriptive and not being prescriptive enough when it comes to standards.

“Cyber security should keep us up at night,” said O’Brien. “We really need to think of it as a system, a layered security system approach.”

Majumdar at Grid 20/20

Tuesday, while keynote speaker Arun Majumdar, director of Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), was preparing to present at the Grid 2020 forum, President Obama nominated him to fill the under secretary position in the Department of Energy.

Commissioner Rick Morgan

How can we engage customers without infringing on their privacy? Rick Morgan, commissioner with the District of Columbia Public Service Commission posed the question to the “Engaging the Customer” panel.

Common themes among the presenters: Customers must be interested first before being engaged, and education is the key to developing that interest. The complexity of the energy industry makes building interest challenging, presenters said.

Engaging the Customer Panel

Michael Starke, research staff member in the Power and Energy Systems Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He has contributed to ORNL reports, including several related to electric and hybrid vehicles, fuel cells and direct current technologies. His recent research focus has been system integration of wind, hydro, buildings and energy storage technologies.

The diversification of electric supply is driving the ORNL’s research. It’s looking at demand response at residential sites to better understand the interaction with refrigerators, dishwashers and other appliances. Starke said that if customers aren’t interested they won’t participate.

Phil Davis, senior manager – Demand Response Solutions for Schneider Electric, develops grid interconnection strategies for energy efficiency and renewable programs for large energy users. Schneider Electric’s goal is to take advantage of previously inflexible load.

He discussed the design and installation of a ground-breaking “intelligent building system” in New York. The building, which he described as its own ecosystem, was developed to integrate and control all of the major systems efficiently and to leverage savings where possible.

The challenge, he said, is that building managers don’t often understand how these systems can work together or the costs that could be saved—the building in his example is saving $50,000 a month due to the improvements.

Judith Schwartz, a strategic communications consultant to the National Action Plan Coaltion, has worked on promoting new disruptive technologies. She compared the smart grid’s stage of development to the beginning of the Internet. Although the possibilities aren’t fully recognized yet, she said, its imperative first to look at things from the customers’ perspective.

“If they don’t trust you, they are not going to engage,” Schwartz said. She said that the industry needs to know what it wants consumers to do in order to offer them choices and educate them. “You need to offer them choices that resonate with them.”

Harvey Michaels teaches energy efficiency and strategy innovation and directs the MIT Energy Efficiency Strategy Project, which includes business/policy studies of utility, community and Smart Grid-enabled efficiency deployment models.

Michaels said that his group looks at the democratization of the demand-side in the energy market. Where many in the industry are looking at large-scale, institutional participation with demand response, he’s looking at all of the others—the residential customers.

“Our research project is looking at how are we going to engage consumers to get this to happen,” Michaels said.

Raj Vaswani, Silver Spring Networks, provides hardware, software and services to utilities to build-out smart grid solutions.

His firm looks at the behaviors of consumers and builds strategies around increasing energy efficiency and cost savings. He notes that, according to the Department of Energy, “If the grid were just 5 percent more efficient, the energy savings would equate to permanently eliminating the fuel and greenhouse gas emissions from 53 million cars.”

Justin Segall, founder and executive vice president of Simple Energy, manages energy industry and utility partner relationships for Simple Energy.

Segall pointed out that, although the average consumers would spend more than 14,000 minutes on Facebook a year, they only spend about six minutes interacting with their utility.

“We don’t have the attention of the consumers,” Segall said. “They have been trained to ‘set it and forget it.’”

Biofuels produced by electron-consuming organisms and lithium batteries that run on water are just a couple innovations being explored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), said Arun Majumdar, the agency’s director, in his keynote remarks today.

Arun Majumdar, Director, Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy

ARPA-E is the federal agency devoted to transformational energy research and development—an agency Majumdar developed two years ago in response to recommendations made in a governmental report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”

The report, he said, was intended to examine the areas where the United States is failing and identifying the issues the country faces in the future. ARPA-E invests in science and technology that is too risky for private sector investment

“There are many parts of the world where people haven’t turned on the lights, and they want to turn on the right kind of lights,” said Majumdar, noting that the world’s population density when shown on a map isn’t necessarily aligned with where energy consumption is.

“This is the biggest business opportunity of the 21st century,” he said, noting that the U.S. has to understand what role it wants in that opportunity.

ARPA-E is focused on three goals: national security, economic security and environmental security.

In developing these new technologies, the challenges are in the costs of fuels for energy. Driving toward low-cost fuels that don’t increase carbon output is one of the aims of his agency. He noted that the country imports 50 percent of the oil we use and we pay about $1 billion a day for it. At the same time, coal is the cheapest fuel that the U.S. has available.

Biofuels are one example of how the agency is exploring alternatives for fuel. While the industry has figured out how to produce oil from these various sources, the cost and efficiency of doing so don’t make it scalable. Scientists are looking at organisms that actually consume electrons and produce oil.

Another vector for energy for transportation is electrification, he said. He noted that batteries have had the biggest cost. Agency scientists are looking at different technologies to improve the efficiency and cost of lithium ion batteries, including the development of a battery that runs in water.

In addition to the cost of fuels and energy efficiencies, ARPA-E is working on projects to address aging infrastructure of the grid as well as carbon capture technology.

Prior to joining ARPA-E, Majumdar was the associate laboratory director for energy and environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. His research career includes the science and engineering of energy conversion, transport and storage ranging from molecular and nano scale level to large energy systems.

Panel 1: Balancing Supply and Demand

Andy Ott, PJM senior vice president – Market Services, moderated this panel focused on ways to meet the demands for grid flexibility.

Mark McGranahan of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) said that flexibility and developing a communications-and-control infrastructure will be key to meeting the vision of balancing the changing nature of supply and demand. He said that among the challenges will be developing metrics to measure these developments.

Eva Gardow, senior project manager – FirstEnergy, described the Integrated Distributed Energy Resources (IDER) project, which manages demand response from residential, commercial and industrial loads. The program integrates diverse technologies such as controllable ice chillers and smart meters.

Paul Steffes, CEO – Steffes Corporation, believes that by optimizing water heater consumption to align with low real-time energy prices, and by providing wholesale services such as frequency regulation, a water heater could provide positive revenue. Steffes Corporation has 100,000 thermal storage devices deployed in the U.S., one of which is located in PJM’s Technology Center.

Angie Beehler, senior director of energy regulation/legislation – Walmart, discussed Walmart’s goals, challenges and accomplishments. She said there are 352 advanced metering systems at Walmart locations in PJM, and all Walmart stores in Pennsylvania have one-minute interval data meters. Walmart justifies the expense of installing advanced metering equipment by participating in the Synchronous Reserve Market. Walmart recouped the equipment costs in less than a year by responding to just two demand response events

Kevin Moyer, executive director of energy programs – Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, discussed the various projects underway at the Port Authority. They are working to develop renewable energy projects on EPA brown-field sites by repurposing this land for new energy developments. Moyer shared details of the authority’s plan to develop a former Jeep (Chrysler) manufacturing footprint into a green energy industrial park

Bob Gorgone, director of Navy Yard energy & sustainability planning & management – Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), discussed the PIDC’s overall goal of creating a clean energy campus at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He reviewed some of projects underway at the Navy Yard, including three buildings currently under construction. They are bucking the current economic trend with eight new projects slated for 2012. With this type of growth, he said, they’d reach capacity at the Navy Yard by 2013. He discussed a project they are working on with PJM, the University of Pennsylvania and other partners to begin to educate consumers on the real cost of electricity.

PJM CEO Terry Boston delivered opening remarks.

PJM President and CEO Terry Boston welcomed the 200+ energy industry experts to Grid 20/20: Focus on Markets symposium this morning in Washington, D.C.
“We often confuse our uncertainty with our challenges,” Boston commented. “As an industry, uncertainty may be one of our biggest challenges – economic uncertainty and weather uncertainty to name a few.” He reviewed the many weather-related challenges faced in the past year – tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and extreme temperatures.
“The resources in this room are needed to develop a stronger, more flexible grid. I would choose a robust grid over a smart grid every time,” continued Boston.

 Boston characterized today’s environment for transmission as one of the best of times since the 1970s. He cited the TrAIL line, from southwestern Pennsylvania to northern Virginia, as a prime example of the good work between PJM and members to build a 220-mile transmission line in just five years – from siting to activation.

 He countered with the worst of times by discussing the growing threat cyber attacks and the importance of building security into our systems as opposed to “bolting it on.”

 Certainly, the importance of reliability cannot be minimized, he said.

 PJM is intently focused on how to integrate wind energy. “Yes, it’s a challenge, but I think we can meet the challenge,” he said. Boston highlighted his strong belief in energy storage technologies as one way to integrate intermittent resources, specifically mentioning pumped storage, large-scale compressed air, mobile batteries and even water heaters.

 Boston closed by emphasizing the importance of innovation. He mentioned that power engineering is not rocket science – it’s more important given how integral electricity is to our economy. “The innovations we will discuss today,” he said, “will help us prepare and deal with the future energy needs.”

Welcome to the live forum of Grid 20/20! Please follow this throughout the two days for updates.