Ray Tuomey checked his dashboard this week.

But he wasn't driving his car.

Tuomey was at his computer at work, logged on to "dashboard" - a Web site that allows him to find out how much electricity and natural gas his Boulder home uses at any point of time.

"I knew I was not going home directly after work, so I didn't want to heat up my home until 9 or 10 p.m.," he said.

Tuomey used the Web site to lower his thermostat, adjusting it so that his furnace would kick up the room temperature right around the time he expected to be back home that night.

Adjusting the thermostat reduced his gas usage and lowered his utility bill. It also reduced carbon emission, a pollutant that heats up the atmosphere.

Tuomey is among the 100,000 Boulder residents who either have or will become a part of Xcel Energy's "smart grid" project.

The project, which kicked off in April, will cost around $100 million. Xcel will pay $22 million, and its partners will pitch in the rest. Once completed this year, Boulder will sport the first fully integrated smart grid in the nation.

"A lot of people are talking about smart grids," said Peter Corsell, CEO of GridPoint Inc. of Arlington, Va., which provides information technology and is working with Xcel in Boulder. "Xcel was the first utility to come out with a clearly defined, complete plan, integrated end to end."

Eight cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado made it to Xcel's final list, but Boulder won because of its ideal population size and high number of technologically savvy customers.

By summer, Boulderites will be able to figure out how much energy they are using, or which appliances are drawing too much power.

They can plug in electric vehicles, charging the car batteries at night when power is cheap and feeding power back to the grid in the afternoon when demand is high and power is expensive.

Xcel can look into the grid to see whether there's a power outage and fix a problem without waiting for customer complaints.

Such two-way communication between homes and the grid could drastically improve the way electricity is distributed, saving hundreds of millions of dollars by decreasing the need to build new power plants.

Smart Grid is not a new concept.

Xcel has been working on the idea for five years, but lately it has become the phrase du jour.

In his inaugural speech, President Barack Obama touted the virtues of a smart grid, saying it would save money, protect power sources from blackout or attack and deliver clean energy nationwide.

The $819 billion economic stimulus bill approved by the U.S. House included up to $32 billion to upgrade the country's electric grid.

What is a smart grid?

"Essentially it's making an analog grid into a digital grid," said Roy Palmer, Xcel's project executive for the smart-grid program.

The program has many parts, such as smart meters that help two-way communication between the grid and homes, dashboards and automation equipment for transformers.

Xcel already has installed more than 15,000 smart meters and plans to place 10,000 more in the coming months. It has laid more than 100 miles of fiber optic cables and 1,800 monitoring devices on the poles where transformers are located to monitor energy passing through the point.

The utility has partnered with four vendors to test various technologies.

For instance, GridPoint installed the dashboard in Tuomey's home that allows him to monitor and adjust his electricity and gas consumption from any computer with an Internet connection.

The company also sends him a weekly report, detailing which appliances in the house draw the most power.

University of Colorado behavioral scientists are working with Xcel Energy to gauge whether people are willing to become more active energy consumers. Some Boulderites say smart grid is changing their behavior.

Dennis Arfmann and his wife realized their clothes dryer was using an enormous amount of electricity, as was the freezer in the garage - all thanks to smart grid technology.

"We made a deal: We hardly use our dryer anymore and hang our clothes on a clothesline," he said. "We have unplugged the freezer in the garage and use the frozen compartment in the refrigerator."

The Arfmanns' electric usage has fallen by almost half.

chakrabartyg@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2976; The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Back to Top