Top Down Approach to Smart Grid Implementation And the Impact of Large Scale Utility Solar

The US Department of Energy allocated over $3 billion, directly for Smart Grid investment under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. A unique aspect of this allocation was study and implementation of Smart Grid with a top down approach, with the objective of making transmission system more intelligent. Implementing Smart Grid on the transmission system also include providing dynamic, real time assessment of the nation’s transmission system which has many advantages including better and wider implementation of large scale solar energy.Solar project, in the mean time have been transforming from pure play in the electricity retail market to a competitive, bulk electricity markets. With the implementation of Smart Grid devices on the transmission system, solar energy is likely to play a strategic and tactical role in managing America’s massive and interconnected grid. 

With solar going mainstream and connecting at transmission voltages, marketing large scale solar generation as a strategic tool to utilities and ISOs rather than a pure revenue based offering is important and beneficial. This is expected to benefit large scale solar with a significant environmental footprint and hence leeser chances of approval and acceptance.  There is also an opportunity to increase production revenue of a solar project by evaluating various interconnection points.  

Utility and ISO engineers need to gain a better understanding of how solar is part of the solution and not the problem. The intermittency of solar can be used a tactical tool to address many of the challenges, faced during operation of a complex electric grid. Solar energy, when strategically developed can be the solution to most, if not all of these problems. Transmission Smart Grid is expected to help achieve many  of the above objectives.