The applications request for approximately $46m to help fund smart grid demonstration projects for customers served by Consolidated Edison Company of New York and Orange & Rockland Utilities.
Earlier, the company applied for $172m in federal funding for smart grid projects. According to Con Edison, the stimulus money would help fund an overall $435m smart grid program. The stimulus funds would widen the scope of the company’s existing smart grid efforts to modernize the electric grid.
Smart grid technologies would help the company’s three million customers use energy efficiently, support alternative energy sources, enable the adoption of electric vehicle charging, and improve reliability to all customers including major medical facilities, transportation systems, financial institutions, and media centers. Con Edison would work with various parties in this filing that calls for testing various types of smart grid technologies in a large-scale demonstration project. The pilot would also enable new technologies that would increase reliability, adaptability and efficiency in grid operation, the company noted.
The elements that make up the demonstration project include: working with the New York City Economic Development Corporation and Viridity Energy to improve building technologies and solar generation from City owned properties, such as the Brooklyn Army Terminal, into clean, virtual power generation, and working with The Boeing Company to create a middleware communications and cyber security network that would serve as the common operating environment and command and control network of an enhanced Con Edison smart grid, the same technology is being used by the United States Department of Defense.
The elements also include working with Columbia University, The Prosser Group and CALM Energy on technology that allows a smart grid to increase use of renewable energy, provides energy storage, incorporates preventive maintenance and self healing capabilities to avoid system failures, and working with Rudin Management Company customers to demonstrate emergency response and energy efficiency improvements.
This demonstration project is intended to show how new technologies can lower costs for consumers in the energy market in America, while lowering carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions. Con Edison and its team would work toward delivering a smart grid expandable to every electric system throughout the country.
The DOE plans to distribute $3.9 billion in Recovery Act funds for smart grid projects by providing $3.3 billion to deploy and implement smart grid technologies across the country and by providing $615m for smart grid demonstration projects.
