By Betsy Loeff
AMRA News Writer

“TXU Electric Delivery made history on Wednesday, January 31 and, by design, nobody noticed.”

Those words begin a letter the Dallas-based utility sent out to local officials and others to commemorate a noteworthy first-time event. The utility's broadband-over-power-line (BPL) network sensed a problem and alerted engineers to impending trouble well before the failing equipment could cause customers inconvenience.

This happened almost as soon as engineers flipped the switch to activate the BPL network in the affected area. When utility workers investigated the potential problem sensors detected, they found a loose split-bolt connector on a neutral wire. Line workers replaced the failing equipment before any customers called in with complaints about flickering lights.

It's one thing to fix a problem once customers wind up in the dark. It's another to prevent breakdowns from happening in the first place.

That's a primary goal for staff at TXU Electric Delivery, Houston-based CenterPoint Energy and several other organizations focused on getting intelligent grid applications up and running in the Lone Star State.

Advanced metering is one of the first technologies that will be deployed to support the grid of the future. Still, metering alone won't do the trick. Smart-grid applications cover multiple technologies, so various players must join together to develop them. That's what's happening in Texas, where utility professionals, university thinkers, product developers and others are banding together to make the smart grid real.

Putting Building Blocks in Place

“There are three main components of the intelligent grid,” says Don Cortez, CenterPoint's vice president of distribution support. “The first is the communication system. Second is the advanced metering infrastructure. The third component is the grid devices that help you manage the grid better.” Those devices can include equipment such as pole-top switches, which are now planned as an early grid enhancement for this utility.

But, first, there's the metering.

Last year, Cortez reports utility managers tested CenterPoint's BPL communication network, which serves as the backbone of the intelligent grid for both CenterPoint and TXU. “You really need a robust communication system to handle intelligent grid applications,” Cortez explains.

To test the reliability of the Corinex Communications network, utility managers read a few hundred advanced meters every 15 minutes for six months, and they double-checked the reads manually. The system performed flawlessly, Cortez says. The only errors recorded were human flubs, not technological glitches.

Now that the network has proven itself trustworthy, CenterPoint is gearing up to install 10,000 meters by the end of March 2007. This may not sound like much from the third-largest gas and electric delivery company in the United States, but Cortez explains that utility managers are moving slowly in planning stages so that they can quickly deploy their meters in the near future.