In the future, an Oak Park resident would be able to leave for work without having to set any timers for air conditioning, lights or any other electronics.
On the way home, a smart phone would sense the distance. When it gets close enough, the phone will send a signal, turning on the air conditioning, the lights and other electronics.
At least that’s the dream.
“You wouldn’t have to do anything,” said John Kelly, deputy director of the Galvin Electricity Initiative, an advocacy group that has been working with the village. “The intelligence will be there.”
The future of the electrical infrastructure in Oak Park has been up for discussion the past few months. While ComEd looks at near-term improvements to its new smart grid system, other experts are looking at Oak Park as an ideal location for an advanced infrastructure system they hope will be the envy of the state, if not the country.
The project would be a collaboration between Galvin, Illinois Institute of Technology, the Illinois Science and Technology Center and Citizen’s Utility Board.
The system could potentially reduce outages by 70 percent with a 50 percent increase in conservation, Kelly said. The plan, called Perfect Power, would take up to 10 years to complete through continues improvements over time. Naperville embraced a similar plan in 1999 and Kelly said outages have steadily dropped since then.
“Outages really come down significantly” with the implementation of the plan,” Kelly said.
Oak Park residents currently pay 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, and the Galvin Institute estimates that up to 8 cents per kilowatt-hour is wasted on inefficiencies.
While the infrastructure is a large part of the plan, there are also ideas like a community efficiency financing program. Based on a program in Babylon, N.Y., the village would provide low interest loans for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects for homes, businesses and schools.
The plan also calls for community choice aggregation, which allows municipalities to purchase their own power on the open market.
But implementation isn’t necessarily right around the corner. Oak Park Sustainability Manager K.C. Poulos said it will take six to nine months to put together a full plan, and there will be time for community input and discussion before the board makes a decision. As it stands, there is no financial commitment from any party.
As for finances, Kelly said much of the costs would be offset from savings incurred from the new system. But it still needs to be built and implemented, and Poulos said much of it would end up with ComEd, with the village contributing. But village board approval will be needed before Oak Park spends any money on the project.
“It could be a percentage, but I’m not picturing anywhere near a majority,” Poulos said.
Both Kelly and Poulos said the Prefect Power plan does not run in contrast to the smart grid pilot program that ComEd has begun in Oak Park and other communities, but expands on it.
As for the smart grid, ComEd plans for some upgrades to the system, which includes nine suburbs and parts of the West Side of Chicago. Digital meters would give residents and businesses a real-time look at how much electricity they are using and the cost. Other improvements include online services to track usage a new billing statements that include how a resident is doing compare to his or her neighbors.
Some residents also have touch-screen monitors that track usage and give detailed information on how to stay on budget.
At the end of this year, ComEd plans to be able to turn on an upgrade at the Oak Park substation that would automatically locate outages and reroute power to keep the number of affected homes and businesses to a minimum. The process currently needs to be done manually at the site of outages. The system also would be able to detect weak points before an outage occurs.
“We would have to send someone out, they would have to take a look at it and they would have restore the devices,” ComEd Smart Grid Manager Rich Gordus Jr. told the board in a presentation Sept. 14. “What this pilot is doing is that we would be able to automatically operate the switches based on the fault location and where it finds the disturbance on the line.”
But whether it’s short-term remedies or long-term plans, Poulos wants Oak Park to be at the forefront of the new technology.
“That’s where we want to be,” Poulos said. “But we can’t get there until the grid is improved.”
