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Guerry Waters and Rob Broadstock talk about the Smart Grid
Lots. Pakistan suffers from a weak management across the board and the mismanagement of Utilities has a more direct and immediate impact to the population. The concept of the Smart Grid can save a lot of the management and distribution challenges that the local power distribution companies are facing.
There are 3 parts to any electricity company. These include: power generation, the actual distribution of the power and then recovery or billing based on the usage. “Oracle’s customers aren’t the end consumers; they are the utility companies themselves. We work with these organizations to help improve their delivery services, ” explains Guerry Waters, VP Industry Strategy for the Utilities Global Business Unit at Oracle. According to a survey conducted with 150 C-level utility executives across the US and Canada in January 2010, the top 4 Smart Grid priorities for the next 10 years is:
- Improving service reliability and operational efficiency
- Implementing smart metering
- Develop demand response and energy efficiency programs
- Updating physical infrastructure
Waters talks about smart meters as an example that can improve the distribution and delivery of power to consumers, enabling the power companies to generate efficient electricity. This includes switching between alternate energy production as well as manage the load.”
Commercial zones require more power during the day than do Residential zones, the trend for which is different than the power requirements in the Industrial zones. Loadshedding, which is part of the cultural fabric in Pakistan, could practically be managed by a Smart Grid if KESC and WAPDA were better aware of the electricity demands from each sector across the grid. While we’d like the end customers to be more responsible about using electricity and restricting its wastage, there’s no real way to hold them accountable for the amount of power wasted. A few months ago, when the City Government in Lahore enforced laws where the Commercial areas in the city would close shop by 9pm, the overall load on the grid was reduced to the extend that the average 12 hours of ongoing loadshedding in the Residential zones, was reduced by an immediate 50%.
But there are more intelligent and accountable ways to better manage electricity distribution.
Rob Broadstock from Oracle Australia explains trends in adoption from the work that’s ongoing back in Victoria, Australia. “We’re working in a wide scale adoption deployment of Smart Meters, which will be complete by 2014, however we’ve seen a lot of isolated pilots ongoing in countries in the APAC region. I am also aware of a pilot ongoing in Pakistan.”
One of the journalists asked why companies would want to work with Oracle when Microsoft and IBM were both strong in the ‘smart’ space. To this, Waters responds, “The others don’t have the integrated software and hardware offerings – we do. That’s what makes us so much stronger in the market.” Even if the local power generation companies are running SAP and IBM, they will still be able to benefit from Oracle’s Smart Grid solution. And then with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle is even in a greater position to dominate a portfolio of solutions for the market in Pakistan.
Guerry Waters, Rob Broadstock talk and the Smart Grid
The Ecosystem
“In addition to just sharing information with our clients, we have a lot Business Intelligence that we share with the rest of the community which helps to outline the roadmap of where we’re headed.” It’s this information that enables everyone from car manufacturers to companies that make kitchen appliances to be Smart in their designs. “Kitchen appliances or vehicles that can be online so you can track what kind of a carbon footprint they are leaving on the environment. That’s the full circle,” explains Waters.
Integration for ROI
There is room for all kinds of technologies and solutions providing the companies are willing to pay for it. Here’s the rationale: technology helps the company to be more efficient, resulting in greater savings which means more profitability and increased accountability to its customers. There is an eventual, cumulative return somewhere in that formula depending on how vast the deployment is.
Pakistan has clear skies and sunlight for almost 11 months of the year, making it a strong candidate for Solar energy production; has strong wind tunnels through the Thar Desert and most of Sindh making Wind energy a reliable option – what it doesn’t have is intelligent solutions to manage the production of the energy nor the accountability in its distribution. Smart Grid does help to relieve both.
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4 Responses to What Can the Smart Grid Mean for Pakistan?
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Very insightful but smart grids in a country where the power grid is nothing more than a cobweb of underrated, overheated, dangling wires; we have a long long way to go before you’ll see any of this….
Agree with solarcipher. Also there are close to 18 DISCOS, or distribution companies in Pakistan which further aggravates the situation. Most importantly, the utilities sector is heavily staffed on political grounds. So their priority is not customers but the agendas of their political parties. Last thing they would need is the transparency that information systems bring to the whole equation. I can’t help but feel sorry for the writer when she says “what it doesn’t have is intelligent solutions to manage the production of the energy nor the accountability in its distribution. “..yeah right….. like they need one?
It is also very remote, and difficult for the power distribution sector to be privatized like media and telecommunications any time soon, reason again being the political motives and heavy handed regulations by NEPRA. Also one of the critical difference being the “method” of distribution, which in both of the former cases primarily is “wireless”, and beyond the intellectual capability of local population to manipulate. With the kunda culture prevalent in Pakistan, most of the time by these consultants would be spent in unwinding the mess they will get themselves into.
I feel sorry for the naivete of these so called foreign consultants because all they are doing is talking non sense when they say “Here’s the rationale: technology helps the company to be more efficient, resulting in greater savings which means more profitability and increased accountability to its customers.”, it just doesn’t matter in this part of the world. It also shows they apparently have no clue about the realities of the power sector, especially the distribution and regulatory side of things in Pakistan.
It’s not the lack of power which Pakistan faces… we can easily produce more than enough power to meet our needs from current resources only. It’s the fact that we are economically and politically not being able to meet the loss of electricity through Theft in our country. That’s why we face this crises. It’s man-made.
Look at areas of DHA where there’s no theft, there’s no load-shedding either.
“SMART GIRID for Pakistan ” is not a one time big project . it needs major planning efforts.
Expanding transmission and applying new technologies will require
a great deal of cooperation between government and industry.
Specifically, six steps should be taken to accelerate the formation of a
smart grid and to enable the expansion of renewable generation and to
reduce the risk of having regional blackouts—which will surely come if
these steps aren’t taken.
1. Build new generation and transmission facilities in coordination
with each other, on a regional basis.
2. Implement technologies necessary for wide-area grid operations.
For an RTO or ISO to operate a large regional power system, key
element of the grid must be “observable”—either through direct
monitoring or computerized estimation. Wide-area monitoring
systems (WAMS) employing phaser measurement units (PMUs)
are now being applied to provide direct measurements.
3. The common practice of operating power systems under conditions
(so-called “N-l contingencies”) that security assessment software
indicates might lead to blackouts should be reconsidered, as should
the type of operations planning that sets up such conditions.
4. Grid operations must be coordinated more closely with power
market operations.
5. Improve emergency operations. Clear lines of authority are needed
to handle emergencies effectively. System operators also need to
be trained more thoroughly in grid restoration and “black starts”
(bootstrapping recovery after a blackout). The whole question of
how to set protective relays in order to prevent the “cascade” of
an outage across a whole region also needs to be reexamined.
6. Information systems and procedures need to be updated. Complex
data communications underlies power system operations, especially
during an emergency. Many of these systems need upgrading,
using advanced technologies, and the procedures for their use
should also be fundamentally revised.