The Owen Sound region is the testing ground for Hydro One as it looks to update its electricity distribution system to incorporate everything from smart meters to thousands of new generating systems feeding renewable energy from solar panels, biomass generators and wind turbines into the provincial grid.
"Hydro One's transmission system is very smart. They can operate it remotely, they can see the whole system right across the province from our grid control centre in Barrie and it's highly automated. The distribution system not so much," Dave Watts, the communications lead for the Hydro One's advanced distribution system project, said in a recent interview.
"A customer has to call us to let us know the power is out. We can't see the system, we can't remotely operate equipment on the system, we can't monitor the health of the system . . . Our work in the Owen Sound area is a first initial step at (changing) that."
That work, to begin later this year, consists of modernizing and automating one of the four transformer stations, two of the 30 distribution stations and 20 or so of the few hundred switches, controllers, reclosers and other devices in the Owen Sound region — an area roughly bounded by Tobermory, Hanover, Lake Huron and Stayner, according to Danièle Gauvin, a spokeswoman for Hydro One.
"This work will be largely invisible to customers in the short-term. However, over the longer term, the modernization of the system will result in less frequent power interruptions of shorter duration as the new equipment will sense power interruptions automatically, much better data collection on the 'health' of the system, allowing us to make more efficient maintenance and operating decisions and safely and reliably incorporating small renewable cleaner forms of generation on the distribution system," Gauvin said in an e-mail.
"This work will be largely invisible to customers in the short-term. However, over the longer term, the modernization of the system will result in less frequent power interruptions of shorter duration as the new equipment will sense power interruptions automatically, much better data collection on the 'health' of the system, allowing us to make more efficient maintenance and operating decisions and safely and reliably incorporating small renewable cleaner forms of generation on the distribution system," Gauvin said in an e-mail.
"Today, when a switch needs to be opened or closed, a line crew would be sent to do that," Watts said. "The notion is to automate some of those devices so they can be monitored remotely and worked remotely."
The project won't be first of its kind in the industry, according to Watts. "Many of the larger utilities in the province, for example Toronto Hydro, they have this automation now."
The key difference is geography. "Many utilities like Hydro One have widely dispersed, less dense geographies and traditionally this equipment is not used in those geographies. But given the emerging technologies . . . this becomes absolutely doable," he said.
Utilities in Ontario already have the ability to turn down the central air conditioning units of customers who have signed up for the "peaksaver" program. There are predictions fridges will soon keep track what's inside them and suggest recipes based on that, warn when milk is going bad according to its best before date and be hooked into the Internet or a smartphone app so it can order supplies. Combined those sorts of things with smart meters, which measure when you're using power and how much, and it raises some serous questions how well customers' privacy is protected on the so-called smart grid.
Ann Cavoukian, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner, has warned the smart grid "has the potential to erode privacy, as new components will be able to collect far more granular data about electricity consumption in the household — from the time you go to bed, to when you shower, to when you eat, to whether you have an electronic security system."
But Hydro One, working with Cavoukian and suppliers GE, IBM and Telvent have come up with the "gold standard" of protection, the privacy commission said at a recent convention.
It has been "baked into" the system at the design stage, Gauvin said. "It just sends the encrypted data of here's how much usage there was in this household at this time. It wouldn't say it was a stove that was on versus something else that was on. It wouldn't say this is Mrs. Smith's meter."
There are two components to smart meters, Watts said.
One measures electricity use and one is basically a radio that "twice a day wakes up and communicates with the meter next to it and to the next meter, to the next meter, to the next meter" in a local area network.
That network feeds a regional collector and the regional collector sends the data to Hydro One. "We, in turn, provide that data to a central data warehouse . . . They verify all the buckets are filled up, all the hourly intervals, then they send it back to us for billing," he said. "What you can view today, if I go up to your meter, a conventional meter, I can get your meter number and your usage. With a smart meter same thing, meter number and usage."
It will take about a year to get the Owen Sound region program up and running. How long it will take to roll it out across Hydro One's whole system — the company has 122,000 kilometres of low voltage lines serving 1.3 million customers in Ontario — Watts couldn't say.
