National Grid's Smart Grid Pilot Delayed
National Grid has voluntarily withdrawn its proposal to implement a large-scale smart gird pilot program in Worcester County and hopes to propose a new plan later this year, company officials said.
The Waltham-based public utility originally announced plans in 2008 for a smart grid pilot program with the intention of implementing it in 2009. All utilities were required to draft such plans by the 2008 Green Communities Act.
But after months of review by the state Department of Public Utilities, the company voluntarily withdrew the application in February.
National Grid hopes to submit a second proposal to the DPU for review by Dec. 15 if not sooner, according to Cheri Warren, vice president of asset management for National Grid.
Not So Fast
Smart grid programs are a way of managing power usage and distribution, which includes giving customers additional tools to monitor their real-time energy usage. The theory is such programs would give customers incentives to scale back consumption during peak times.
National Grid's pilot program was initially slated to include about 15,000 customers in the Worcester area and cost about $56 million.
Warren said the details of the new proposal are still being worked out, but she expects it will still include about 15,000 customers, but with a smaller investment by the company.
She said the second-generation proposal will be more inclusive and "much more community-focused" compared to the first proposal. It will also include the use of new technologies that have been developed since the company made its first proposal.
Warren said the company is examining the possibility of working with some "non-traditional" players, such as leading retail or technology companies to see what types of products they might have that the company could integrate into the system.
A spokesperson for the DPU said that when National Grid issued its first proposal, state officials responded by asking for some additional details about how the program would be reviewed and evaluated. Then, the company withdrew its proposal instead of amending it.
Part of the reason for the withdrawal was because there have been technology advancements that National Grid wanted to include in the pilot, according to Timothy Shevlin, the DPU's executive director.
He said the company's first proposal was "substantial" compared to those proposed by the state's other public utilities, including NStar and New Hampshire-based Unitil Corp.
NStar's pilot program includes the communities of Jamaica Plain, Newton and Hopkinton, and already has more than 400 participants with the company expecting to add more soon, according to Michael Durand, an NStar spokesman.
Unitil is beginning it's about 300-customer pilot program this summer, but only about one-third of those will be in Massachusetts, Shevlin said.
Western Massachusetts Electric Co. also withdrew its petition after the DPU rejected its original proposal, Shevlin said. He expects the company to file another proposal as well.
He said there is no specific timeline for when the utilities must have the pilots implemented by, but state officials have been charged by the Legislature to create a report evaluating the progress of the pilots by September 2012.
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