Idaho Business Review — Monday, August 25, 2008
During southeast Idaho’s hot, dry summers, as much as one-third of the region’s base-load power demand comes from the massive irrigation pumps that keep its agricultural industry alive.
But sharing the grid are tens of thousands of air conditioners and fans, all of which get cranked up at the same time, often outstripping a utility’s ability to provide enough power. That leads to pricey power purchases or the construction of “peaker” power plants, used only in case of spikes in demand. Hoping to avoid some of those expenses, Rocky Mountain Power, which serves southeastern Idaho, has turned to Boise-based M2M Communications for an innovative, technological solution to managing peak demand.
The 6-year-old company is in the process of installing about 4,000 intelligent wireless power switches on irrigation pumps which will allow the utility to remotely monitor their power usage and turn them off during peak demand times.
“It allows the company to provide a targeted, specific, peak load management service, and by so doing that helps to delay some of the infrastructure developments,” said Margaret Oler, a spokeswoman for PacifiCorp, Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company. “If you can manage that peak then you avoid just continually putting greater and greater amounts of infrastructure in place. You can manage that better by managing that peak, and your existing infrastructure is managed more efficiently.”
M2M co-founder Steve Hodges said the Web-to-wireless system –which is cellular and satellite based –already has about 2,000 units in place and will be monitoring and controlling 400 million watts by next summer, allowing the utility to shift enough energy from the non-critical irrigation load to power around 50,000 homes.
“The alternatives are much worse –the utility could build a new power plant or they could buy energy from out of state,” Hodges said. “These peaks only last a few hours and only occur a couple times a year… so by clipping those peaks off the demand curve they can avoid building these big expensive generation plants.”
Inclusion in the system is voluntary, though Rocky Mountain Power gives participating farmers credits on unused power (more than $684,000 worth last year). For example, Hodges said if the utility was preparing to shut down the pumps it would automatically send out voice or e-mail messages alerting farmers, who could then decide to opt out. (Though after two opt outs they would be charged the price Rocky Mountain Power would otherwise have to pay for power during the shut down.) Olersaid the system has been working well since its trial period began in summer 2006, and, according to numbers from last summer, delivered benefits three times great than its cost. Hodges said each unit costs an average of $1,000.