A municipal utility in the South may not be where you’d expect to find an exemplary smart grid implementation, but that’s just fine with EPB Chattanooga. Its leaders are raking in the kudos—including POWER’s 2013 Smart Grid Award—and their community is attracting new businesses in response to a fiber-optic-based system that has helped raise the profile of their city and bolster the sustainability of their utility.
Some utilities look at the process of installing smart grid technologies as a matter of necessary, partial or piecemeal upgrades. They may install smart meters in at least a portion of their service area to cut down on truck rolls, for example. Given the pushback on smart grid technologies that some utilities have faced from small but vocal minorities, and the difficulty others have had with regulators, undertaking smart grid projects can be fraught with controversy and delays. For others, including EPB (formerly Electric Power Board) Chattanooga (EPB), a smart grid project can be the lifeline to a sustainable future.
EPB, which does business under the brands EPB Electric Power and EPB Fiber Optics, was chosen as this year’s POWER Smart Grid Award winner for two main reasons. First, its technology choices, timing, and implementation have returned noteworthy benefits to the utility, its customers, and the community as a whole. Second, and more unusual, its smart grid work has enabled the utility to enter new business sectors that broaden and deepen its customer base, thereby giving it access to new revenue streams.
EPB has served the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, since 1935 and is one of the largest municipal distribution companies in the country, serving 170,000 customers in a 600-square-mile area. As a community-owned utility, it aims to serve the community while providing reliable, low-cost services. Thanks to its smart grid, EPB has been able to deliver on that promise in unusual ways. Most notably, since September 2010, when EPB became the first company in the U.S. to offer 1-gigabit-per-second Internet speed, the high-speed communications it offers have been a distinctive selling point for city business leaders and developers. Of course, the fiber-optic cable enabling this new service was installed first and foremost to communicate with smart meters, smart switches, and all other smart grid devices.
Low-cost electricity is made possible in part by being a customer of Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), whose portfolio is roughly 32% coal, 34% nuclear, 9% hydro, and 11% gas, with the balance coming mostly from natural gas combined cycle merchant plants. EPB also has 12 MW of customer-owned renewable generation on its distribution system, which includes a solar farm at an automobile manufacturing plant, one at the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport, and 68 individual customers with varying levels of solar generation. But the smart grid has also kept costs low, as you’ll see.
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