TVA pilot to test efficiency

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - TVA may be focused on big problems like cleaning up coal ash waste and how to build nuclear plants, but energy efficiency and smart grid technologies are also on the agency's radar.

A small pilot project with four distributors across TVA's eight-state region will allow residential customers to see their power usage in real time and, in some cases, let distributors control thermostat and water heater settings to show how such technologies might help alleviate power requirements during times of peak demand.

Gibson Electric Membership Corp. in Northwest Tennessee, Murfreesboro Electric Department in Middle Tennessee, Pennyrile Rural Electric Cooperative Corp. in Kentucky and Tri-County Electric Membership Corp. in Lafayette, Tenn., are taking part in the initiative. Customers will participate on a volunteer basis.

The pilot study will include three groups of residences, with a total of about 1,400 customers. The first group will be current customers serving as a control group. The second group will be provided with a device that, communicating with the electric meter, will provide a detailed picture of power consumption.

The third group of customers will be equipped with the displays as well as a thermostat and water meter that can be controlled directly by the power distributor. This allows utilities to, for example, switch off a water heater or adjust a thermostat to ease the demands on the system.

Both the second and third groups of customers will receive a small incentive for participating in the project, he said, although he declined to elaborate.

"Working with those distributors, we will gather information about how effective it was reducing the load and working with those three groups," he said. TVA is paying for the meters, thermostats and displays on a reimbursement basis.

In the case of the third group of customers, TVA and distributors must determine how to go about reducing customers' demand for power and how often they can do so before residents get fed up with the program.

"If we drive a customer to fatigue, we've lost our incentive in recruiting our customer," Ingram said. "We don't want to go there. But we want to understand with the pilot kind of where that (point of fatigue) is."

The second group of customers will help TVA determine to what extent customers, armed with information about their power usage, will curb electricity demand on their own.

The technologies also will come in handy when and if TVA decides to charge customers for power based on when they use it — but Ingram said that's still a long-term plan.

"Time of use with residential customers is several years away, but what this type of equipment does provideÂ… is information," he said. "At best (a typical power bill)Â… only compares the information from last month or a year ago."

The steady stream of information provided by smart grid technologies "would be very informative and useful to customers who have that kind of information now with their bank accounts, their stock accountsÂ… or even their movie account when they order movies online," he said.