When Pacific Gas & Electric started deploying its technicians to install new electric meters in San Francisco and Oakland, most of the thinking was about the benefits these meters could reap. The new meters would be capable of sharing real-time usage data with the company and customers alike, and the hope was that this information would lead to new ways to reduce not only peak power demand, but also total power consumption. It’s this promise that is spurring utilities around the country to invest in the so-called smart grid.
 What few people anticipated was that the city itself would seemingly conspire against installing the smart grid.
“There are about one hundred years of meters in San Francisco,” said William Deveraux, PG&E’s senior director for the SmartMeter program. “Customers have built tightly around them, so there is no room to attach a network device.”
Some residential customers, for example, enclosed meters in add-on rooms, leaving a window so they could be read. But there’s no physical access, or clearance for an outside meter is so limited that only the meter fits.
And even if a new meter can be installed, there’s no guarantee that it can relay any information. “If a meter is in a metal or concrete room, it creates a whole host of engineering challenges to get the signal out,” Deveraux said.
“In suburban areas, the ratio of meters to [data] collectors is about five thousand to one,” Deveraux said. “In urban areas, the ratio drops, so we need either more relays or access points.”
Either way, it’s more headaches.
Creating the smart grid on a national scale will be perhaps the biggest change to the electrical system since the rural electrification effort of the 1930s. And the engineers involved with planning it always knew that it would be an enormous undertaking. But the challenges engineers are facing in implementing the new grid are fo |
