In 2010, Southern Company signed a Smart Grid Investment Grant agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy , formally accepting a $165 million award to be dispensed throughout the company’s four-state service territory over a three-year period. This federal funding, which will be matched by Southern Company, enables us to continue our long history of investment in the company’s transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure, ensuring that our robust electric grid becomes smarter, more resilient, and more efficient through the application of intelligent electronic devices.

SGIG Projects

The SGIG award emphasizes ensuring a smarter grid through upgrades to T&D infrastructure at Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power and Mississippi Power. Transmission projects focus on transmission line automation and smart substations that enhance monitoring, protection and control capabilities. Distribution enhancements include distribution automation, energy efficiency and fault location.

Much of the work will involve installation of advanced hardware, including:

• SCADA-enabled, automated transmission and distribution line devices
  
• Remote Monitoring devices and Electronic Relays in substations
  
• Integrated Distribution Management System (IDMS), which includes automatic fault isolation and service restoration

Our SGIG projects are on schedule and will conclude on or before April 28, 2013.

SGIG Benefits

Southern Company planned and budgeted for these improvements before applying for the SGIG. The grant will allow us to dramatically accelerate the deployment of these technologies, effectively doubling our infrastructure investment over the same time period.

The SGIG project will optimize grid performance and reliability by using electronic data, intelligent devices and integrated systems. We anticipate that these investments will minimize the loss of energy as it travels across the grid, and improve reliability, safety, power quality, and operating resiliency to natural disasters.

Customers will also benefit from Southern Company’s ability to conduct predictive maintenance and respond faster to system disturbances.

Existing Smart Grid Technologies at
Southern Company

Virtually all of the more than 4,600 distribution breakers are SCADA enabled. This system has been in place in various forms for more than 30 years.

Self-healing networks include applications to automatically isolate faulted sections on a circuit and restore service to areas that are not directly impacted by the problem. These have been in place on a limited basis for more than five years.

Outage Management System (OMS), a geospatial and tabular system that utilizes a dynamic electrical model that is a near real-time representation of the distribution system, has been in place for more than 10 years.

A Sensus Flexnet system has been deployed for Southern Company’s Advanced Metering Infrastructure project. The system includes 280 tower-mounted radios to reach more than 4 million meters.