General Electric Chooses Hawaiian Resort as Test Site for Smart Grid

Ever been to Wailea? You have to have deep pockets to reside there. Every home there is a McMansion. I suppose a self-contained community like this is an ideal test subject, but a truly smart(er) grid would be one that can handle the town of Kihei just down the road, where there's a mix of new and old, big and small, hotels and hovels, and strip malls galore.

If James2 is correct, I hope that this is just an initial test. The normal situation would probably be messier and closer to the town of Kihei.

Mmm... Evangeline Lilly can smarten my grid when she wants.

OK, with all the volcanoes.....why isn't Hawaii using more geothermal power?? I whould think there would be plenty to power about everything over there....

With all that water, don't you think that they could use brine batteries to supplement? OR ocean current / wave generators, heck, why not even use wind mills? seriously, an island, in the middle of the ocean, what more ideal condition do you need to use alternative sources?

It’s a shame that America’s most beautiful state is it’s least ecologically energy minded. Hopefully this pilot program will spur independent investment so that private properties in Hawaii will start to become self sufficient.

www.elements-koh-samui.com

GRYD FEASIBILITY WHITE PAPER ON SMARTGRID COMMUNICATIONS IEEE 1901TM BROADBAND POWER LINE STANDARD FOR 500 Mbps

New standard is enabling technology for Smart Grid, transportation and LAN applications was finally approved.
But the challenges and feasibility is yet to be tried in real world applications, so GRYD.org integrated synchrophasor and meter data as sample projects on short distance power lines.

There was major challenge to go over interconnects or low and medium voltage interconnects, what GRYD.org found was that, these devices were not designed for communication and some levels of interference was observed.

The optimal solution, that GRYD.org found was in both the first mile and last mile applications where distances were less than 1200 m, similar to early DSL ranges. For e.g. in the GRYD.org smartgrid server, GRYD was able to process, upto 30,000 simultaneous price signals, HVAC/Charging setback signals, demand response signals etc.

The limitation of using IEEE 1901TM Broadband over Power Line (BPL), was that it was limited to less than 100 Mhz. The good news is that it was designed using sophisticated modulation techniques to transmit data over standard AC power lines of any voltage.

GRYD.org observed there was a lot of promise on this smart grid technology, especially to connect AMI Smart meter with a lot of participants. It's still very early to tell about the adoption, but Comcast and Verizon like providers will find this competition if the power companies succeed.

There are some videos and pictures to show how the smart grid BPL compares to comcast from the GRYD labs, but external links are not allowed, so drop GRYD.org them an email.

Some references, you may have to check on how current they are with respect to the smart grid and government, energy standards

Oracle lodestar Aclara
ieee.org

www.gryd.org
smartgrid.gov

www.doe.gov
www.smartgryd.com www.nist.gov
www.ekh.in