Our electricity system is changing rapidly around us.
New sources of renewable power are meeting technologies that can crunch unprecedented amounts of data.
It’s all leading to a major shakeup for how utilities do business.
In this next installment in our series on the US electricity grid, Inside Energy Reporter Dan Boyce takes us to Fort Collins, Colorado for a peek into our utility’s possible future.
NETH: “I’m Cara Neth, and right now our house is 68 degrees.”
A temperature like that is actually a big deal for Cara and her husband, Torger Hougan.
Just a couple of months ago, they would struggle to get the thermostat up to 50 or 60.
HOUGAN: “I wore a hat and a coat, all the time.”
Huddling under blankets.
Faulty ducts were essentially pumping heat out into the dirt around their home.
NETH: “Really uncomfortable, unlivable really.”
(AMBI, OPENING FLOOR TILE)
Now, the couple pull open a trap door in their closet.
NETH: “So, what you’re seeing down there is the new duct work.”
Revealing the results of a more than $13-thousand dollar heating system upgrade.
NETH: “It’s changed our lives…”
Cara and Torger’s Fort Collins home is one piece of our potential utility of the future.
Stay with me, it will make more sense if I back up and explain the other pieces first.
(AMBI-windshield wipers)
John Phelan is driving me to piece number one.
PHELAN: “I’m energy services manager here at Fort Collins Utilities.”
(AMBI door closes.)
The city government runs a small, municipal utility and the installation of this first piece happened about three years ago.
(ambi walking)
around the back of his home- there it is.
PHELAN: “Basic gray box on the side of the house.”
A smart meter, in all its splendor.
BOYCE: “It looks sorta, sorta”
PHELAN: “Sorta normal.”
BOYCE: “Boring...boring.”
The city has installed about 70,000 of these things.
Now, both customers and the utility can see their energy use in 15-minute increments , versus once a month before.
Dennis Sumner is Senior Electrical Engineer with Fort Collins Utilities.
SUMNER: “I think of this as a paradigm-shifting investment.”
But that paradigm shift -- it really hasn’t happened yet, in most places.
SUMNER: “Of itself, it doesn’t generate energy, of itself it doesn’t reduce energy use.”
But the data these smart meters supply provides a foundation Fort Collins needs. Here’s why:
Local elected leaders set a goal for the city to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Right now, the utility gets the vast majority of its power from coal, so that’s an ambitious target.
SUMNER: “It’s gonna take a lot of work.”
Leading to the second piece of our utility of the future--choice.
Fort Collins needs two more things to accomplish its climate goals:
Residents need to use less energy, and the city needs to get that energy from many more places -- from community solar gardens, rooftop solar, wind power.
All that’s going to change the relationship people have with the utility.
Under the current model, they bring us electricity and we pay for it.
Sumner says in the future,
SUMNER: “We can tailor the delivery, customer can decide their own package that they want.”
Customers will buy and sell electricity on the grid, zapping energy back and forth from their solar panels, or stored in their electric cars.
TONG: “It’s a marketplace.”
James Tong is with the group Clean Power Finance. He predicts the grid of the future will work like an App Store. Utilities….
TONG: “... provide the hardware that hosts the platform, but they also curate the vendors.”
The only way Fort Collins will keep this energy transition affordable is if the citizens buy into renewables and, more importantly, make their homes as energy efficient as possible.
Fort Collins is trying to spur residents to action through the final piece of our utility of the future...financing.
(AMBI laughter)
Which brings us back to Cara and Torger’s.
NETH: “We couldn’t have gotten it done without the city’s help.”
They didn’t have the $13 thousand dollars to upgrade their heating… but the utility did.
Customers can borrow from Fort Collins Utilities to pay for energy efficiency projects, or renewables like solar.
Cara and Torger make payments right on their monthly utility bill, and say in the wintertime, they’ll save money.
NETH: “Because we’re not using six space heaters spread all over the house.”
Energy researchers at the Rocky Mountain Institute say Fort Collins is the first utility in the country to offer real long term loans at attractive rates…
All to get customers to make these upgrades and keep monthly bills low,
Energy Services Manager John Phelan says they’ll need everything at their disposal to push toward this utility of the future.
PHELAN: “There is no silver bullet, what we need are silver bbs.”
Fort Collins hopes all these bbs, bundled up, will keep them in business in a changing world of electricity. Its an experiment in grid innovation many in the industry are watching closely.
For Inside Energy, I’m Dan Boyce.
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Stay tuned ___________ to hear more on our series Blackout: Reinventing the Grid.Inside Energy is a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues.
