Power Supply, Smart Grid
Expert Cautions on Grid Investments
MINNEAPOLIS—“How many smart grid applications are available?” No sooner did Cal Stewart pose the question than he proceeded to answer it.
“Fifty, 75, 100 different things out there. There’s tons of things,” said Stewart, vice president of strategic relations at Maryland-based Davies Consulting.
“And you know what? In another month, in another two months, in another six months, there’s going to be more—a lot more—because it just keeps rolling out.”
The reason Stewart asked and answered that question was to get co-ops thinking about an even more important question: “What is it that you really need on your system?”
Stewart offered guidance for co-ops to answer that in a Rates Summit breakout session on “Technology Strategy and Options: Making Investments Work.” It turns out other questions need to be addressed in order to answer the big one.
“Just because you can go out and buy it, is that something you should be doing?” Stewart said.
“Every co-op should take a hard look at what the needs of the co-op and its members are before making decisions on what smart grid technologies to purchase and install,” he said. “If at all possible, they should perform some sort of analysis to determine which strategies make the most sense.”
“If the technology is not aligned with the objectives of the organization, why is it there? What benefit does it have?”
And, once a co-op installs smart grid technology, Stewart warned of the flood of information that’s likely to come.
“You will have the opportunity to collect more data than you can imagine,” he said.
“If you’re going to collect data without really understanding what you need the data for or what you are going to do with it, I would submit to you that what you’re doing is costing your organization a lot of money.”