Atlanta's Growing Population Increases Power Demands

Southern Company has some Smart ideas
As the Southeast continues to be one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation, such rapid growth in population necessitates growth in infrastructure, including transmission and distribution lines for electricity.
    With 4.4 million customers and more than 42,000 megawatts of generating capacity, Atlanta-based Southern Company is supplying a major portion of that much needed energy.  Southern Company owns electric utilities in four states--Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi.
    To date, Southern Company has invested billions of dollars to build and maintain a smarter, more robust transmission and distribution system.  The company recently accepted $165 million in federal infrastructure funds to advance the company's 'smart grid' initiatives across its four-state service territory. Southern Company was awarded the funds by the U.S. Department of Energy, which has allocated $4.5 billion in grants to advance infrastructure projects nationwide as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
    Over the next few years, the company will continue to invest millions in expanding and maintaining the grid to reliably serve its customers through the application of intelligent electronic devices, and the federal infrastructure funds will help Southern Company accelerate the deployment of even smarter technologies.
    A smarter grid benefits the supplier and its customers in a variety of ways by helping to better manage demand, lower operating costs, and improve reliability and efficiency.  It will also better integrate intermittent renewable energy and energy storage options into the system.
    These advances will give customers more control over their energy usage, enabling them to use electricity more efficiently in their own homes or businesses.

In Georgia
Georgia continues to be one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. With that growth comes the need to expand infrastructure to meeting rising demand, including transmission and distribution lines for electricity.
    To do just that, in 2009 Georgia Power, the largest subsidiary of Southern Company, added 507 miles of overhead and underground distribution lines to its network.  Currently, the company co-owns and operates a network of more than 70,877 miles of distribution lines and 12,557 transmission lines.
    Additionally, Georgia Power is investing $3 billion on electrical system upgrades over the next few years. This means the company is expanding and building power lines, substations, and other facilities in order to continue to provide its 2.3 million customers with the reliable electric service they expect and need.
    The company's substations now have enhanced monitoring, protection, and control devices.  Installing advanced metering, or smart meters throughout its service territory will be another improvement in service. This smart meter infrastructure will serve as the last link of a communication's connection with customers.
    Georgia Power will use its portion of the federal infrastructure funds to integrate smart grid technology into its transmission and distribution system to improve operating efficiency and reduce emissions.
    The company also plans to install automated transmission and distribution line devices, which will enable system operators to isolate faulted lines remotely. Many of these devices will be placed in self-healing network schemes that will automatically isolate trouble areas and then restore power to customers on unaffected portions of the circuit, all without operator intervention.
    In order to upgrade its Distribution Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system, better known as the DSCADA system, the company will replace substation relay packages and install equipment monitors. These actions will allow operators to better locate the area of an outage before dispatching crews and enhance overall grid reliability. In addition, 'smart meters' will be available to its 2.3 million customers. The company reached the one million smart meter installation milestone January, 2010, and expects to complete installation of more than four million "smart meters" by 2012 across its four-state service territory.
    These smart meters will take advantage of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) technology which reads meters remotely and generates bills without sending workers door to door. The meters also enhance response times for service requests and curtail the number of service vehicles on the road, reducing pollution and traffic while saving fuel.
    The smart meter offers advantages beyond just tracking electricity usage.  Eventually, customers will gain additional access to energy-use information so they can better manage the electricity they use, and perhaps take advantage of time-of-use rates.
    In the future, the meters will also detect outages and send power restoration notifications--shortening restoration time--and will be able to detect electricity thefts.