Consolidated Edison Co. of New York Inc. (Con Edison) plans to launch a $6 million, 18-month smart grid pilot program in northwest Queens that will test how various technologies support efforts to modernize the electric grid.
The initiative includes a distributed generation project with the City University of New York to study how solar energy can be integrated into the New York City electric grid. The solar energy will be obtained from a 100 kW photovoltaic system on the roof of LaGuardia Community College.
The program will take place within the company's Long Island City network, an 8.3 square-mile area, which has a customer density mixture representative of other areas in the company's system, says Con Edison. The network entirely or partly includes the neighborhoods of Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside and Woodside.
Approximately 1,500 customers will receive smart meters, the main component of an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). Other AMI features include automatic outage notification, remote meter reading, remote reconnection and the ability to communicate energy usage information via other smart building technology to Web portals or in-home displays.
The demonstration program also tests the integration of intelligent underground systems that can monitor, isolate and correct distribution problems to improve reliability; a commercial customer's energy generator and renewable energy resources, such as solar energy, into the grid; and plug-in electric vehicles and their charging stations.
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