Estimating the Benefits of the Gridwise Initiative: TR-160-PNNL

Preliminary estimates of the potential benefits of GridWise, a new initiative designed to bring the aging U.S. electricity grid into the information age. Description of an analytic framework for characterizing and estimating potential benefits from GridWise TM, a national initiative to link electricity suppliers and end-users via high-speed networks that provide real-time information about system capacities, demand, prices, and status. Preliminary results indicate that the gross benefits can be quite large. However, the variance among estimates is also large, so delineating a range of benefits based on plausible input variables is concluded to be more useful at this time than trying to converge on a single 3best estimate.2