Two years ago, nobody was talking about the nation’s electricity grid; today it’s so prominent in the national conversation that Barack Obama mentioned it in his inauguration speech. For energy wonk types, it’s pretty amazing.
Lots of politicians and pundits are sort of waving their hands toward the grid as an energy solution, without being very specific about their goals or the policies needed to get there. To add some clarity, it’s worth distinguishing two distinct grid issues, each with its own technological challenges, regulatory issues, and political implications.
To simplify matters, think of the grid like the nation’s waterways. There are a few big, primary rivers—the high-voltage, long-distance lines that compose the transmission system. Then there are thousands and thousands of smaller tributaries—the lower voltage lines that carry electricity from the transmission system to individual homes and businesses, called the distribution system. (I guess the homes and businesses are ... lakes? Ponds? Frankly I haven’t thought the metaphor through that far.)
With that distinction in mind, we can discern two grid-related subjects of interest to energy/enviro types:
The National Grid
This has to do with extending the transmission system to address two problems:
- First, there aren’t many high-voltage lines that go to the places where renewable energy is most abundant (e.g., the Southwest for solar, the Midwest for wind).
- Second, right now there are (depending on how you count) anywhere from three to seven distinct regional grids that make up the national grid, and they aren’t very well connected. While juice circulates relatively freely within these grids, it’s difficult to get juice from one grid to another.
The wide grid refers to the effort to build a truly national transmission system: a new high-voltage backbone, with lines spanning the length and breadth of the country, able to carry electricity from anywhere it’s generated to anywhere it’s needed. Wide grid advocates argue that linking the entire nation together would mitigate the problem of intermittency—the fact that sun and wind are variable (as opposed to baseload sources that can be turned on and off at will). The more intermittent energy sources are linked together, the more stable and reliable the whole system becomes.
Some of the best work on the wide grid (from an unabashedly pro-expansionist viewpoint) has come out of the conservative Manhattan Institute. In particular, see Peter Huber’s report, The Million Volt Answer to Oil. (More here.) Here’s a map from MI that shows what a wide grid might look like:
You could also check out “Green Corridors: Linking Interregional Transmission Expansion and Renewable Energy Policies” from Resources for the Future.
The Smart Grid
This has to do with improving the intelligence and efficiency of both the distribution system and load—that is, the appliances, machines, and devices that consume electricity.
(The term itself is somewhat fuzzy; it’s not always clear what is and isn’t included.)
Today’s grid uses the same basic technology Edison used when he built the first grid back in the late 19th century. It is designed to take electricity “downhill” from central power stations to where it is used. Three problems with this.
- First, thanks to regulatory reforms that have introduced competition among power producers, electricity is often routed and rerouted between utility regions based on variable wholesale pricing and availability.
- Second, individuals and business can now produce their own power with rooftop solar panels, small-scale wind turbines, or combined heat and power systems—so-called distributed power production. Relative to the old model of large, far-off central station power plants, this new model is highly decentralized. Every node on the grid becomes both producer and consumer, and needs to be able to fluidly draw power from or feed power into the grid, on a real-time basis.
- Third, just over the horizon is a world in which thousands, possibly millions of plug-in hybrid or full-electric vehicles are connected to the grid, with batteries that serve as energy storage devices. (This is known as a vehicle-to-grid, or V2G system—Google is testing it out as we speak.) Each one of these vehicles will draw from the grid when it needs power and feed back into the grid during peak loads; they will be a massive, distributed storage system.
Each of these factors immensely complicates management of the grid. Smart grid advocates want to integrate information technology into the grid in various ways, from “smart meters” that can track residential or commercial electricity use in a real-time, fine-grained way to “smart appliances” that can respond automatically to load and pricing information to “smart buildings” that can coordinate energy use on a larger level. They also want more standardized rules, from state utility regulations allowing customers to feed electricity into the grid to software standards governing how smart meters and appliances communicate.
If you want to read more about smart grid issues you could do worse than “Building a National Clean-Energy Smart Grid” from Bracken Hendricks at the Center for American Progress. Also check out Patrick Mazza’s blogging, both here and at New Energy Nexus.
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This is all quite rudimentary and barely scratches the surface. The point is to sketch the basic lay of the land and get clear that one grid issue is getting more power (transmission lines to new places) and one is using power more efficiently (smarter distributions systems). The politics around those two issues are quite different, something we’ll be exploring more soon.
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Comments
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:15 am
04 Mar 2009
But we need fine grained grid control and demand side management too. And a smart grid and national transmission complement one another. If you are doing demand side management being able to combine demand from differnt time zones and climates smoothes it out. If you are putting variable power into the grid the from distance places being able to delay some demand to match supply is a huge benefit. We need full smart grid, and full national transmission. Not one or the other, but both.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:31 am
04 Mar 2009
The lakes or ponds would be storage, distributed over the entire system. And the larger national super grid could be smart too and have larger storage, resevoirs maybe?
The national super grid should be a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) system, owned by the federal government, just like the federal highway system. It should be buried along rail corridors and freeway medians.
That's the beauty of HVDC, it has very low losses (0.5% per 100 miles) and when it is buried even eliminates the static corona effect, that can produce leakage and electronic interference.
By burying this super grid along rail lines and freeways, rail lines and future high speed commuter rail in freeway median space can be electrified. The other big problems with long distance transmission are right-of-way and NIMBY lawsuits, this eliminates those big obstacles.
Local and regional grids would interconnect alternately feeding power into the super grid or drawing power out. The super grid would act as a sort of national battery. And with huge resevoirs connected directly to the super grid, like Superconducting Electromagnetic Energy Storage, large capacitive storage, pumped hydro, and/or solar furnace thermal cogeneration storage, the super grid can become an actual national battery.
Distributed generation and storage, controlled by smart grid devices can make local and regional grids act like batteries for the super grid too.
What about surplus power, generated when both wind and sun are peaking? It can be used to desalinate sea water and recycle waste water, locking the value of the energy into that valuable commodity.
Should the smart grid follow the model of distributed computing, with each home, building, factory, and energy source interacting with all the others, just like a school of fish or a flight of geese interacts to make up a sort of hive mind that constantly adjusts to change?
I think so, and I'm betting that Google and others are already working on this sort of model. Billing, subsidy distribution, and weather prediction of solar, wind, and temperature paterns flowing across the grid areas would all be handled by the distributed computing smart grid network.
Your home smart grid computer would decide how much power to send/receive from the grid and when to store power in your home (as heat/cold in building mass and appliances and plugin hybrid or emergency backup batteries), based on information from the grid as a whole. This would make local weather prediction based on wind and cloud and air pressure patterns respond in real time to information from every other home up the wind stream.
This whole topic needs a new thread every week or so to cover new developments, technological, political, and financial. Fascinating! Then we are going to get actual results soon, from the boulder smart grid city project and many others around the globe.
The IBM smart grid leader said recently that they are working on 50 projects already worldwide.
The investment opportunities in the companies participating in smart grid technology, applied to local, regional, and the national super grids will rival those of the internet boom and last a lot longer this time. Giving all of us small investors another chance to beat the big boys.
Spot the Ciscos and Dells and Microsofts of this boom early on and ride the green energy wave! Surf's (almost) up!
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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jestbill Posted 2:36 am
04 Mar 2009
Bah!
One reason mentioned was that electricity has to be routed not to where it's needed but to where the most money can be made. That needs to be fixed before any of the rest of this cooperative world can be implemented.
Yes, "cooperative:" we're back to the era when fire departments all had different sized water connections and different financial arrangements and so would stand and watch your property burn.
If one part of the grid can with hold power from or charge monopoly prices to another, there is a real problem.
Where have all the horses gone?
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claseur Posted 4:47 am
04 Mar 2009
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