The United States has started the largest infrastructure project in human history, a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of our entire electrical supply grid, which is getting new intelligent devices at every step from the power company’s generators to the devices in our homes and making sure every component is secure from attack, while also elegant control of water, gas and sewage systems. And this total make-over must happen while the whole system is operating online at peak capacity, while it’s growing in fact. In short, we’ve begun building a smarter power grid, one that works pretty much like the internet. You could call it, the InterGrid.
Our aging power grid system is starting to fail. We’ve seen more blackouts and brownouts, and it runs inefficiently, wasting carbon into the air. New clean sources like wind and solar which make power only part of the time need intelligent pathways to get the consumers, and the Americans prefer the power they use to have been produced by Americans. Right now, our fragile, less-than-smart power grid, interconnect nearly 10,000 utility plants, that’s well over a million mega watts of generating capacity. About half it comes from burning coal. At least one third of the United States carbon output, maybe more, comes from power generation. Almost one fifth of our power steams onto the grid from the boiling water, heated by the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors. Nearly six percent of the electricity used in the US comes from flowing or falling water, hydroelectric power generated at river dams.
But the same six percent of all the electric power that’s produced gets lost before it gets where it’s supposed to go. It either melts away as heat as it travels long more than a quarter million miles of metallic wire, or it simply shorts to grid, undetected somewhere within the constant maintenance headache of the decaying patchwork of cable towers and poles.
Reclaiming just that six percent would be the equivalent of taking 55 million cars off the world in terms of the petroleum saved and green house gases prevented. For the past quarter century, the peak demand for power has been outpacing investment in new transmission line and power regulation systems that can only react when something goes wrong. They are not good at spotting problems before they happen. The old grid flies perilously close to the breaking point, every hot day in sunlight cities.
According the Department of Energy, US businesses use over a hundred billion dollars a year to blackouts and brownouts. The power that does arrive has to be used as soon as it gets there. But up till now, there hasn’t been a good way for consumers to tell the power company how much power they might want to purchase. To keep our electric grid from grinding to a halt, the new InterGrid will work on a principle known as prices to devices.
If you knew the electric rates were going to spike very high this afternoon, you might decide to leave your home air conditioner off while you are out of the house. Well, suppose your air conditioner, in fact your entire home, knew it before you. What if those device, your thermostats, washers, driers, refrigerators, Jacuzzis could make decisions about how much energy to purchase according to your preset preference and tell the utility company what you are willing to pay. And that’s truly speaking truth to power.
To see exactly how the InterGrid will listen to your demands and how it will keep us healthy and secure, please play Part Two of the electric InterGrid.
In Part I of the Electric InterGrid , we saw how consumers and utility companies could both save money and liberate much less carbon into the Atmosphere, if our power network became intelligent and self-aware.
But for this idea to work, every team that makes electricity and most things that use it, must interact with one another. Like the Internet, devices on the InterGrid must be plugged in play, so that any device can hear or speak to any other. And like the Internet, the InterGrid will grow a little with each clever new gadget.
Now, the downside of the power grid that works just like a web, is that it takes close to hacker attacks, launched by pranksters, but also from organized and well-funded terrorists. Soon, every smart meter in every home and business will be something akin to computer virus protection.
The InterGrid must also defend against assaults from Planet Earth itself. Let’s say one day, maybe 10 years from now, a monster hurricane comes ashore, knocking off power. The intelligent InterGrid instantly begins matching energy sources to critical needs, places like hospitals and fire stations must be back online first.
But this InterGrid isn’t depending only on utility power from power plants far away. After all, lines may be down over a large area. It’s also intelligently hunting a whole local energy sources. The solar panels are on your neighbor’s roof, lock logging a hybrid car in your drive lane. Refuels in your daughter’s school – every little bit helps.
Smartly switching power to vital local services like a phone system or a police station is called Ilingding. And it can keep whole communities afloat in times of trouble.
To keep powers flowing, operators must know what the grid is doing, at every level from local streets to international transition lines, to keep small failures from cascading out of control. This is a prototype for a systme to do just that. It’s called VERDY – Visual Energy resources Dynamically on Earth. It overlays different kinds of realtime information on googleearth, bringing weather data, showing which specific power lines are out, and who owns what wires, and how much of the population is affected. It can even pull up web cans of trafic, and evacuation routes.
Believing where everything is completely normal, utility managers still want to know as much as they possibly can, because, frankly, they prefer to produce only as much power as customers are willing to pay for.
Electricity moves essentially at the speed of light. If it is not used, as soon as it’s generated, it goes to waste. But the alternative of black-out is obviously quite inevitable. So, the current grid, depends on what the utility companies call “Peaker Plants.” Nobody likes them. Peakers cost money to build and maintain. They run on fuel that isn’t bought at the best market prices. So “Peak Power” becomes expensive power. Yet “Peaker Plants” sit idle most of the time.
This new intelligent InterGrid could eliminate most “Peakers” by anticipating consumers’ demands through interactive price signals. As engineers say, “If you can measure it, you can manage it.” But ultimately the InterGrid will be judged on how well it does 4 things:
Keeping money in consumer’s pockets;
Making communities safer, more secure and icreasingly self-reliant;
Supporting stable power utilities running on sustainable domestic resources;
Protecting and improving earth environment.
So, what will it cost to do all this? Estimate for the total investment needed here in the United States at about 1.5 trillion dollars over 20 years beginning 2010. What amazingly, that’s just about the amount of money needed anyway, just to keep the lights on, whether we make the grid smarter, cleaner and safer, or just simply keep it working alone.