Power Grid Vendor Portal: Fill & Download for Free

Summary: Smart grid technologies can change peak demand deferring major capital expenditures, reduce enormously the manual labour required to manage the grid and prevent many more expensive grid failures.Smart Grid is a catch-all phrase for a bunch of technologies spanning generation, transmission, management, distribution and consumption. That's a huge range.There are a few ways that smarter grids add value:Greater resilience means fewer failures means lower costRisk and impact: Whether a transmission line goes down from a nuclear reactor or major supplying neighboring geography, or a major capital power plant goes dark unexpectedly, or a storm blows trees down on a major distribution point, the energy grid can see significant surges and dips in power. If unchecked and unmanaged, these dips and surges can cascade through the system, blowing circuit breakers and shorting out various important bits. This can lead, fairly alarmingly, to the eastern seaboard of the USA going dark, putting perhaps 100 million people at risk of freezing in the dark.Smart Grid Value: A lot of smart grid technologies are just monitoring equipment spread all over the place feeding data into distributed and central management areas, allowing rapid responses to local failures that prevent wide-scale grid failures. These responses can include bringing more peak generation online, buying a lot of power from a neighboring jurisdiction, isolating a blackout area from other parts of the grid, or routing electricity along a redundant path.Efficiencies: As energy is made up not just of the cost of generation but also of all of the other components and maintenance of them, and staff overtime for line repair and the cost of regulation when something goes wrong, avoiding major failures has signficant efficiency value. When grid managers are doing their jobs right, they aren't spending their time justifying themselves excessively to regulators. When widespread failures are avoided, massive overtime costs and likely medical claims due to tired crews having accidents are avoided. When expensive capital equipment is shielded from rapid shutdowns or startups, expensive maintenance and readiness / safety inspections are avoided. As an example, if a nuclear reactor has an emergency shutdown, something called a poisoned core is a typical outcome; this can lead to the reactor being out of service for six months or a year easily, with millions of dollars of service costs.Greater electronic, remote monitoring means less manual monitoring therefore lower costsManual version: WIthout smart grid technologies, you have to employ a lot of people to look at dials and meters spread all over the power authority area. As an example, manual meter reading in Quebec, Canada happens six times a year and has a cost of about $6 per meter read for a total cost of $350 million per year. Meter readers are unionized and well-paid to drive around, look at little dials and write down numbers. This is one example of all of the monitoring typically done by humans of the enormous swath of generation units, transmission lines, transformers, distribution points, distribution lines and other grid assets such as the fleets of vehicles necessary for all of these people driving around.Smart Grid Value: Putting smart meters on each house enables meter reading every 15 minutes and no visits by manual meter readers. An entire fleet of vehicles taken off of the road. An entire workforce freed to do something more productive for society and likely themselves.Efficiencies: There are some ancillary costs, but still Hydro Quebec has the potential to save $300 million in labour and fleet costs by putting in smart metering. That's without saving any money by people changing their habits (coming up).Time-of-day pricing leading to changes in consumer behaviour leading to levelling of peak consumption and deferred capital generation projectsCurrent state: As manual meter reading typically occurs monthly or bi-monthly, there is no ability to charge consumers anything except a flat rate for electricity regardless of when they use it during the day.Smart Grid Value: Smart metering enables consumers to know what they are consuming in much more granular ways either through dashboard appliances in their homes or through portals (much more common and valuable as a solution now). Time-of-day pricing charges differentiated rates to consumers: more at peak times, less at non-peak times, lowest at trough times such as the middle of the night.Efficiencies: A small percentage of the populace will, without anything other than that knowledge, change their behaviour to reduce their overall consumption. Add time-of-day pricing and make that visible on people's bills and all of a sudden larger changes in behaviour start to occur, especially in high-electricity cost jurisdictions. People put use timers to bake stuff, run dishwashers or do laundry in the middle of the night. People open windows for breezes rather than run their air conditioners full bore at 6 PM. People who do this in high-cost jurisdictions save a ton of money on their electricity bills and tell their friends, neighbours and co-workers, who also do it. This is great for them as consumers: lower costs. But it's also great for the grid management people. All of a sudden, a bunch of the peak demand has shifted to non-peak hours. That is really, really valuable because the grid management folks have to have sufficient generation capacity for the peak plus emergency backup; shifting demand out of peak means that they don't have to build more generation capacity, or can shut down the least efficient generation capacity.Better and more frequent electronic monitoring makes asset maintenance more efficient and effectiveManual system: All of the assets of the grid -- generation plants, lines, transformers, etc -- are manually inspected on a sub-optimal timetable; the grid management people balance frequency and quality of data with cost of acquiring the data. As a result, they are dealing with sub-optimal information that doesn't allow maximal optimization of asset maintenance, which can be really expensive. As a result, they maintain many assets more than is strictly necessary, at great systemic expense. And some they under-maintain through lack of insight into edge wear conditions leading to expensive failures.Smart Grid Value: Instrumentation of assets and electronic capturing and centralization of assets provides up-to-date information and much more of it on assets. This allows much more systemic analysis of that information. This allows much more optimization of asset maintenance, downtime and much better prevention of failures.Efficiencies: Assets last longer, operate for more of their lifespans and fail much less often, requiring less expensive emergency repairs. Tons of money here.Grid management automation reduces the need for manual grid management staffManual system: Somewhere in every jurisdiction there is a building or several buildings full of very bright, very educated, expensive people. Many of them are approaching retirement, or working on contract after retirement. They gather all of the data related to the grid. They author reports. They think of strategies to improve the grid. They respond to emergencies. And every day a whole bunch of them are responding to fluctuations in demand, generation and grid stability in real-time; three shifts worth of them in fact. With backup. And failover. And vacation staffing plans. And then there are all of the people that they talk to in the field who manually adjust dials and start and stop generation plants manually.Smart Grid Value: Distributed intelligence in the grid means that current and next generation distribution points can manage many voltage fluctuations in their small portion of the grid without human intervention of any sort, damping oscillations and keeping electricity humming along at the right pitch. Centralized grid management intelligence systems can automatically deal with many grid destabilizing situations without human intervention, asking wind farms via SCADA-interfaces to feather their blades for example, or automatically drawing down on energy contracts from neighbouring jurisdictions, or adjusting the settings on distribution points to ensure that energy stays clean. They can produce all of the reports and data analyses that the smaller number of people need. And they can alert the smaller number of people much more rapidly when something that truly requires human input and intelligence is required.Efficiencies: Lots fewer expensive people sitting around doing stuff that computers can do both much more cheaply and much better. Lots fewer staff driving out to distribution points in fleet vehicles. Lots fewer fleet vehicles.It's also worth noting that while this isn't directly to your question, smart grids reduce human deaths, accidents and other situations requiring medical treatment and hospitalization. They do this directly by reducing the number of times workers have to do routine maintenance and by reducing the number of times workers have to do emergency fixes; both of these types of work lead to workplace accidents and when you are dealing with potentially hundreds of thousands of volts and 100 meter heights, minor accidents kill. Smart grids do this indirectly by reducing power outages and allowing people to have cooling on lethally hot days and heating on lethally cold days at a lower price and with greater certainty. They ensure that people have lights when they need them so they have fewer accidents in crisis situations.Finally, grids have been becoming smarter for decades, mostly starting in the major generation and transmission side of things. SCADA interfaces have been around for a long time. Instrumented reading of remote systems has existed for a long time. All of the smart people I referenced above have been exploiting efficiencies to bring better value to their stakeholders and consumers for a long time. Smart grid is just them working with major vendors such as GE and IBM to continue doing what they have been doing: exploiting advances in technology to make the grid better for everyone.

To generate solar power by installing solar panels on the roof of the houses, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India is implementing Grid-connected Rooftop Solar Scheme (Phase-II).Under this scheme Ministry is providing 40% subsidy for the first 3 kW and 20% subsidy beyond 3 kW and upto 10 kW. The scheme is being implemented in the states by local Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOMs).Almost all the DISCOMs have issued online process for this purpose. Residential consumers willing to set-up a rooftop solar plant under MNRE scheme can apply online and get rooftop solar plants installed by listed vendors. For this, they have to pay the cost of rooftop solar plant by reducing the subsidy amount given by the Ministry as per the prescribed rate to the vendor.The process of which is given on the online portal of the DISCOMs. The subsidy amount will be provided to the vendors by the Ministry through the DISCOMs. Domestic consumers are informed that to get subsidy under the scheme of the Ministry, they should install rooftop solar plants only from the empanelled vendors of the DISCOMs following due process of approval by DISCOMs.

Reasons why rooftop solar panels not used in domestic and commercial context are as follows:-Promotion of Solar Power as one of the major electricity generation system is yet to grow its wings in India. There are numerous reasons why the concept of solar energy has not yet reached to the masses in India. To count with, we may consider following:-Huge Investment as Upfront cost for installation of solar power plants.Lack of awareness among common users like rural and urban household users.Lack of clarity over rules and regulations pertaining to implementation of use and usage of solar energy at root level.Doubts and confusion prevails over Government’s directions and instructions.New GST rule is unclear about imposition of tax brackets in respect of solar energy devices.Storage batteries are heavily taxed in the highest bracket of GST i.e. 28%.Rest of the Services provided by the Solar Vendors are also highly taxed as services up to 18% in new GST regime.Implementation of Government’s policies on Solar are not very much effective.Despite all efforts by Government of India, transparency in disbursal of solar subsidies through MNRE via State Nodal Agencies is not very effective hence lacks proper implementation.All states have their own mechanism of solar subsidies instead of adopting a universal and uniform way of disbursal.Method of implementation of solar subsidy is very complicated in most of the states.Solar Subsidy disbursal is not decentralised yet by the State Nodal Agencies except few states like Haryana where transparency and a smooth system has been maintained through online portal by HAREDA.Non-availability of net meters with power DISCOMs.Disheartened indulgence of DISCOM Power Companies in implementation of Grid Connected Rooftop Solar Power Plants.Lack of coordination between MNRE, State Nodal Agencies and Power Companies as well as District Level Authorities in Electricity Boards.Solar devices quality issues at Manufacturer level.Lack of trained and skilled manpower in solar energy sector.People at grass root level are unaware of benefits of solar energy.