Singapore power grid to get smart

4 big-name firms to lead consortium rolling out intelligent system for tracking electricity use
Amresh Gunasingham, Straits Times 8 May 10;

THE Energy Market Authority (EMA) has identified four big-name companies to lead a consortium rolling out Singapore's first smart grid, which makes energy use cheaper and more efficient, in the western part of the island.

The firms - IBM, Accenture, Logica and Siemens - are industry leaders in the field of intelligent system solutions that enable a consumer to, for example, manage his electricity consumption at home by tracking the amount used depending on the time of day.

EMA said that depending on the results, the technology could be incorporated into Singapore's power grid. The goal is to get greater efficiency - both from providers delivering the power and consumers who use it.

Mr Foo Soo Guan, programme manager for the Intelligent Energy System project at Siemens, added that the multimillion-dollar project, first announced last year, is expected to be rolled out in the second half of the year.

It will involve, among other things, the installation of a few thousand smart meters on sites such as Nanyang Technological University, the neighbouring Clean Tech Park in Jalan Bahar, and other residential and industrial sites.

In homes, smart meters use digital technology to communicate with power generators and feed real-time information to users about how much energy they are using. If they can see their bill actually ticking upwards, home users may be motivated to turn off unnecessary appliances to cut down on costs.

Or they might decide to wait to use energy during off-peak periods - between 11pm and 7am - when tariffs are cheaper, said Mr Luke Clemente, General Electric's general manager for smart grid transmission and distribution.

A smart meter might look more like a computer board than a meter reader, said Mr George Tan, director of Smarter Planet Initiative, IBM Asean. 'More importantly, it measures the consumption very frequently, every 15 minutes, in most cases, rather than once a month,' he said.

In two trials carried out last year, 400 homes wired with smart meters managed to cut their electricity consumption by 2 per cent over six months.

By being able to monitor the usage patterns of consumers, power companies could in future provide pricing plans tailored to an individual household's needs.

A smart grid also enables them to incorporate renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar into the power distribution network as well as support electric-powered vehicles, which will be able to sell unused electricity back to the national grid.

The companies in the consortium come with proven track records.

IBM, for example, is involved in as many as 60 smart grid projects around the world, including two in the American cities of Houston and Dallas aiming to deploy up to five million smart meters in homes, while Accenture is working with the Dutch city of Amsterdam on an electric car plug-in programme.

Around the world, countries are engaging in a smart grid 'war' to wire their power grids with the more intelligent systems, which can prevent the billions of dollars lost in a major power failure.

Here, more than 80 per cent of electricity is presently generated from gas, which mostly comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. The Government is actively exploring the feasibility of nuclear and coal as well as other renewable sources.