Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has reported to state regulators on its progress in modernizing the electric grid to improve safety and reliability while delivering energy and cost savings to customers. PG&E intends to deploy smart meters to all PG&E customers by the end of 2013. By the end of March PG&E had deployed 9,625,000 meters. It is installing about 6,000 meters per day.
Reducing outages
PG&E’s smart grid improvements include outage detection program, which can
check individual meters to determine whether or not power has been
restored; “self-healing” circuits that significantly reduce the average
length of an outage by re-routing power flows; and superphasors on the transmission system that provide early warning of
potential problems.
As a result of these systems PG&E reported that last year, PG&E customers experienced the fewest minutes without electricity in company history – 3.8 million customer outage minutes were avoided.
Consumer demand response
SmartRate is a voluntary summer consumer peak reduction plan. For a maximum of 15 days, which PG&E calls call SmartDays, consumers will be notified to shift their energy usage from peak (between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m). On SmartDays, the peak rate is increased to encourage consumers to reduce energy usage during this period.
PG&E’s SmartRate program is already the largest residential critical peak pricing program in the United States, with more than 120,000 residential customers enrolled in the program. In 2012, the program saved more than 500 megawatt hours, more than double the energy savings in 2011.
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