Smart electricity meters come to Lawrence

[mckitterick]

This is an interesting development: Lawrence to become first city in Kansas to get smart electricity meters. Because federal law requires that local utilities provide "net metering" for citizens who ask for it, these meters will allow individuals who produce power at home (solar, wind, fuel cell, and so forth) to sell excess back to the utility. Considering that most wind and solar power is generated during the day when it gets hot in Kansas - and when electricity rates are at their highest - this looks like a good thing.

This bumps up my plan to re-roof the house using solar panels or solar shingles to next year. Join the home-power revolution!

Chris

Comments

[ericreynolds.livejournal.com]

Cool! I've thought about doing the solar shingles when roof-replacement time comes. Last I checked there weren't any tax credits for doing that in Kansas. But maybe some federal ones in the works? I remember seeing a small one, but that might be expanded now.

[stonetable.livejournal.com]

Much appreciated, Chris! Ties right in to the rewrite of one my workshop stories I'm finally finishing up.

How is the wind power situation in Kansas? I know wind turbines have been spreading out across both in western Illinois and throughout southeast Ontario.

[chernobylred.livejournal.com]

Yay to getting off the grid! Kinda! Sorta!

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

I think renewable energy investment is deductible on federal taxes, and I seem to recall seeing that Kansas also has a deduction. When I was first considering this, I figured that it would refund a big portion of the investment at tax-time.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Happy to help!

Lots of wind (and wind-farms) in Western Kansas, but 'round these parts, you want to be at the top of a hill to get reliable wind. Otherwise I'd be so there.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

In the end, this would turn out to be more along the lines of, "Yay for getting discounted power!"

[stuology.livejournal.com]

I got to play a bit with AMR/AMI meters before I left work. We were deploying them in Colorado. I was thrilled at all the programming possibilies just because I had a wealth of information about your meter and your usage. I could program to talk to your meter.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Cool... and a bit creepy.

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

awesome

[bellanorth.livejournal.com]

I attended Alice Bean's DIY Science talk last week on this very subject, and it was interesting. Between solar panels and a few other changes to make her home more energy efficient, she should not only be discounting her energy bills every month but for a couple months of each year, actually making money from Westar if all the variables stay relatively the same. It is very appealing to get off the grid in this fashion.

[stuology.livejournal.com]

If your lights start blinking on and off in morse code, well, I don't work for Westar, but Mac does...

Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha...ha...

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's a hopeful anecdote!

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Hm. Perhaps I should set up a battery-backup system.

:-D

[tully01.livejournal.com]

I had a meeting with a Westar Veep about this very thing not long ago. They love the idea of smart meters as it would allow them to tweak your usage at peak load times to reduce the high cost of auxiliary generation. Their base load plants are nuke and coal but the aux plants use natural gas, which costs more. Being able to offset that aux gas generation at peak load times whether through tweaking or "selling back" to them is good for them either way, because they can buy back from you at less than spot generation or spot-market purchase prices.

They claim you'll never notice their tweaking. Dunno about that.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Interesting point. I'd always wondered where the added cost came from - thought it had just been due to running the generators faster.

[ericreynolds.livejournal.com]

There is a group of artists out in the Flint Hills who are opposed to wind turbines scattered across the landscape. I'm kind of on the fence on that. I love wind power, but I also would like to see one of the few scenic places in Kansas not be spoiled. Maybe if they could make wind turbines look like trees...

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

I feel similarly to you, Eric, but new tech allows much less-intrusive wind generators. Just no one's using them! Still, they're tech on otherwise unspoiled land.

Better than new coal plants, though....

[ericreynolds.livejournal.com]

Yeah, better than coal plants.

[stuology.livejournal.com]

We encountered them and others when the company I worked for tried to build wind turbines in the Flint Hills. Not just for the destruction of the pretty, but for the bits of natural prairie grass that it would kill and the threat to the prairie chickens. That was when I learned there was such a thing as a prairie chicken, and it wasn't just a Kansas colloquialism for a pheasant.

[stuology.livejournal.com]

South Dakota. I drove through 6 hours of South Dakota that was just like Western Kansas. There is nothing there to destroy. And no people to offend. And the wind, it is crazier than Kansas.

When I was working there, I did ask why there weren't tons of wind farms and the reasons were that there is sometimes too much wind that current wind turbines can't handle. And there currently isn't the infrastructure built there to transport all that energy elsewhere. It will be costly to initially set up.

But if someone ever makes that huge investment, South Dakota is a landmine of unoffensive wind power.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

When Obama was running for Prez, he promised to upgrade our energy infrastructure. I read somewhere that building wind-farms all across the Dakotas could power the electricity needs of the entire US.

Two great tastes that go great together!

[tully01.livejournal.com]

Coal and nuke plants take WAY too long to spin up/down for temp loads and don't load-adjust much at all. And they don't scale well. They're pretty much "steady state" output, either running or not. Natural gas generators can be started and running in minutes, scale well to variable output, and can be taken back offline in minutes as well when the load drops again. But the cost per kWh is far higher.

Westar sells the off-peak excess from the base generation to the grid, but by nature that means they sell it when demand and prices are at their lows for the day.

[justaqt.livejournal.com]

What kind of shingles are you looking at?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8fOQ9V9mg

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of! Now if demand drops prices....

[roya-spirit.livejournal.com]

My dad pointed out that Westar offered free thermostats a month or two ago. (I know, not a smart meter, but a freebie programmable thermostat). There was the same claim that you won't notice when they offset the high loads with cycling your thermostat, but I'm not sure how much I trusted that, so I passed on the offer. Haven't heard if anyone has taken them up on it around here.

[geekmom.livejournal.com]

I talked to a company at CES that said they were about five years away from getting affordable modular units that would let you do just that. I'd love my roof to collect energy. All it does right now is keep the rain out.

[geekmom.livejournal.com]

When the alternative is coal, I'll take the spoiled landscape.

[geekmom.livejournal.com]

There's also a Google gadget to monitor your power from your desktop.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Of course there is!

[geekmom.livejournal.com]

I wonder if prairie chickens like acid rain.

[geekmom.livejournal.com]

Google doesn't need the gadget. They already know how you use your power. And you've been very naughty.

But if you want to see how you use your power: http://www.google.com/powermeter/about/index.html

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's pretty cool - not the Big Brother aspect but the tools to watch one's own use.

[stuology.livejournal.com]

That kind of thought would require fanaticals to be rational. And you know what would happen then...dogs and cats living together!