The city of Austin, Texas recently announced a smart grid project. Smart grids, you may recall, are one of the core elements of the Grand Climate Plan. Although the Austin project isn't the first such effort in the country, officials hope that the city will be able to move faster than others, because Austin actually owns the local power provider.
Right now you may be wondering: What's a smart grid?
Glad you asked. The term refers to a set of complementary technologies that share the aim of moving power from producer to consumer in a more intelligent manner than our current dumb grid. The dumb grid we have now works under a basic principle: Utilities make electricity and send it down the wire. Consumers plug in and pay a bill each month. The end.
A smart grid might incorporate any of the following features:
- The ability to move power from point-to-point in a distributed fashion. Say half the buildings in your neighborhood have solar panels, the other half have wind turbines, and all of them own plug-in hybrid automobiles. With a smart grid, power can be moved from wherever it's being produced to wherever it's needed, and excess can be stored in the plug-ins' batteries to be drawn down later when demand is at a peak.
- The ability to fine tune demand. Imagine that rather than just plugging in and sucking power, your appliances communicate with the grid to coordinate their power consumption. For example, all 600 refrigerators in your neighborhood won't decide to run their compressors at the same time.
- The ability to fine tune rates. Another way to adjust demand is to make power cheaper when demand is lowest, and vice versa.
- The ability to send power long distances. This capability is critical to bringing renewable energy to places that don't have ready access to supply.
All of this stuff is fairly theoretical at this point, and a host of software and hardware challenges need to be overcome. Part of Austin's goal is to open up their system to experiments:
We will open Austin Energy's grid to entrepreneurs and researchers to test prototype technologies in the real world. We aren't just going to build a lab -- the City of Austin will be the lab.
Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power?
Obama launches climate push with December goal
Comments
View as Flat
Jib Posted 8:24 am
10 Dec 2008
I don't want my devices telling you enviro control freaks anything - we're already in a 1984 police state. If you want to help the environment, push a free market power grid, dont force people into anything.
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jagwire Posted 9:32 am
10 Dec 2008
Carbon is an essential ingredient for life, carbon dioxide is not. Granted plants consume C02 as part of their energy production CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It absorbs infrared radiation in the atmosphere. CO2 level in the atmosphere are higher now than they have been in 800,000 years and are climbing.
There are other methods of storing energy besides batteries. In fact we are using them with the current electric grid, large scale capacitors, flywheel energy storage and other systems are in place. Batteries won't in fact be used regardless of the euphemistic term that will get bandied about because everyone knows what a battery is and not everyone knows what a flywheel is.
Free market power grid. We know how well that works. It can be summed up in one word, Enron.
What Austin is doing is actually thinking in the long term, something most people and organization fail to do.
Neo-feudalism? How so? That's kind of a whacko thing to say.
.jagwire
http://www.hollowmen.net
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Jib Posted 4:50 am
11 Dec 2008
Enron wasnt freemarket, the customers had no choice who they used for their power. Explain to me how thats free market? Its not.
You just admitted co2 is what plants breathe but then say its not an essential ingredient for life? I am sorry you have been victimized by global warming propaganda and its nonsensical nature, but check out these links for some more info.
And before you say its big oil, explain to me why the head of BP oil is pushing global warming too? Theyre the ones to gain - the monopoly men that own the oil companies also own the central banks that the carbon tax will be paid to.
Globalists Love Global Warming http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2007/280307glob ...
Alex Jones explains the carbon credit scam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH9pyL_lrvM
Global Warming or Global Governance http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8147337841241405 ...
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Pangolin Posted 5:15 am
11 Dec 2008
Enron was promoted as a "free-market" solution by market fundamentalists. If CO2 is so wonderful try breathing it at 20% saturation; dose matters. If you're going to troll at least try and get a single fact right.
Global warming is real. It melts ice at both poles and glaciers all over the world. Glaciers I walked on twenty years ago are gone. Ignorance in the face of facts is just stupidity. Try education.
Put the Carbon Back
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Jib Posted 12:06 pm
11 Dec 2008
I dont know what fundamentalists youre talking about, but that is not free market. A free market power grid would be you actually having a choice where you get your power from. The ones that overcharge and use a source you disagree with? Vote with your wallet for a green power company. If theres not one, a true free market wouldnt allow monopoly control so you could start your own.
And the ice caps are not melting - they have dramatically increased in size since 2007. Arctic Ice Grows 30 Per Cent In a Year http://www.prisonplanet.com/arctic-ice-grows-30-per-cent- ...
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Bob Wallace Posted 1:17 pm
11 Dec 2008
I thought you could.
2007 was a very unique, and very scary, year when it comes to Arctic ice. The 2007 melt off was very extreme. Unlike anything we had ever seen before.
There has been an observed downward trend in the amount of ice that lasted through the summer for the last several years. 2007 was one of those points that one sees in essentially any "noisy" graph.
The 2008 melt off was bad, very bad, just not quite as bad as 2007.
Take a look at 2007 and 2008 vs. 1979-2000 average.
http://www.nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/200812_Figur ...
Notice how Mr. Bogus cherry-picked an August date when the difference between 2007 and 2008 was, in fact, quite less by the end of the summer?
Here's the December 3 update from the folks who take the data....
"The period of very rapid ice growth that characterized October and early November has ended. The rise in ice extent over the past three weeks has been much slower, and should continue to slow until the expected seasonal ice extent maximum is reached sometime in March.
Air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean stayed well above average during November, partly because of continued heat release from the ocean to the atmosphere and partly because of a pattern of atmospheric circulation transporting warm air into the region."
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jimbeyer Posted 1:49 pm
11 Dec 2008
A major issue with the smart grid is the problem of centralized control vs. decentralized control. Most of the utilities want this top-down, central control, because that's what they are used to, and the system would be 'tidier' to them. You need less demand? Fine, you shut down the appliances of the folks that have agreed to it, even if it is tiny fine print they can barely read on their electric bills. Big Brother on the electricity switch.
Compare and contrast this with a purer system based on real-time pricing. If you have a peaking event, electricity gets more expensive and the consumers react appropriately. Is this a bit more complicated? Yes. Is it a bit harder to control? Perhaps; who knows how the consumer will act. Is this fairer? I would say so.
Note also that if the consumer also produces energy (like from a solar panel) then this too can be sold to the utility (or not) based on price. An active pricing will thus encourage consumers to avoid energy use when it is expensive and for producers to provide also when it is expensive.
Or you can have Big Brother turning on and off a switch.
Build plugin hybrids that run on renewable methane. That's all that's needed.
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:39 pm
11 Dec 2008
But, how do you manage demand shifting if it's not from top down?
Suppose it's the middle of a hot day and power is scarce. Prices are up. Do you expect someone at the utility company to give you a call and let you know that you might want to crank your thermostat up a few degrees to save some money?
How about an hour later when the wind starts blowing like snot and prices drop. Another call to let you know that power is cheap and you can cool down?
Or how about when the utility company can see that power is available cheap from suppliers for the next hour, good time to turn the freezer down and give it more 'glide time' until rates go back down in three hours?
There's a level of power micro management that can be done from the top, but I have no idea how you would possibly do as good a job from the bottom.
Any ideas?
--
You got a solar panel on your roof and a grid intertie? Your power demands are going to be lower when the sun is on the panel.
You make extra power? Sell it back to the utility at wholesale price.
That part seems simple to me. Smart meters measure both directions, unlike the old one-way types.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:46 pm
11 Dec 2008
"Any ideas?"
Evidently not.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:52 pm
11 Dec 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 3:33 pm
11 Dec 2008
Consider distributed computing, remember Napster anyone? Instead of a central server with computers connected to it, it was made up of computers acting as servers.
A smart grid uses distributed generation and storage controlled by distributed computing to adjust demand to match supply.
Consider the way a school of fish swims, how each fish keys off of the fish around it, then the whole school moves together. The rules that the fish follow are simple, the activity of the whole school takes many supercomputers to model. But inject the simple rules, called Fractals in mathematics theory, into a computer and it can simulate the action of a school of fish.
Fractal theory is used to model weather too. And nuclear detonations.
With a smart grid computer, in your home, sensing the status of the grid and communicating that local status to the other smart grid devices in buildings and factories and metering and controlling the input from solar, wind, and biogas systems and storing energy as heat or cold in building mass, freezers, and hot water heaters, then the whole smart grid would manage to get all of us fish, little and big, to get along swimmingly right into a low cost, zero GHG energy future.
The big fish, like a huge wind farm or solar thermal plant, can be brought along with the school. Big power calls for big storage, in millions of plugin hybrid batteries or in superconducting electromagnetic storage systems. The utility sdupply my power here was the first to use this storage technology on a utility scale.
Anyway, this is a rough explanation of how a distributed smart grid makes the old central power plant model obsolete.
Each home's power switched by a smart grid device that is sensing the demand and supply over the whole grid by communicating with the other devices. Your heat would come on during low demand hours and ground source heat would be stored in your floor. Or cold if you were in a hot climate.
Your cothes would get washed at night and your dishes and your hot water would be heated and stored offpeak. Your freezer would be cooled and the cold to refrigerate your food would be stored off peak. Your plugin car would be charged offpeak. So would home batteries to power your essential stuff during peak demand hours.
All the high energy demand applications in your home, all those things you need power for, would be done offpeak. Simple, multiply it all out to every building, factory, and facility. That's plenty of storage.
Smart grid devices would bill your account or credit it, depending on if you provided power or used it, or stored it for the grid in your batteries. The government would regulate this actual free market in electricty, freeing it up from monopoly control.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:59 pm
11 Dec 2008
Information is going to flow from above. Above sees upcoming price hikes and bargains. Central is going to see upcoming problems and might find it advantageous to sell you a little extra freezer power cheap now in order to not have to look for some very hard to find power an hour from now.
Your appliances are going to have some built in logic (just like the refers that are being tried out in England at the moment). Temperature limits are going to something that you set (or accept via the factory default) and a signal to "buy now" is going to be used by the refer to cool down if needed.
All the dish/car/washing machine stuff is likely to have its own brain. And fairly simple brains at that. Just a basic "gotta do this job by this time, gotta stay at least this hot/cold" and "cheap now or later?" decision sorts of stuff.
Tying it all together in house would be overkill and complicate the system.
At least that's how I see it playing out.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:59 pm
11 Dec 2008
Well with a smart grid, the "iceman" would make the ice right in your freezer, offpeak. Then it would last for a day or so, it would have salt in it so it was colder than regular ice and would keep your frozen food frozen.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 4:12 pm
11 Dec 2008
That's not how it works Bob. Think decentralized, think distributed. How does that school make those fantastic shapes? Flowing waves in response to the environment.
It's not from central control. It forms from the simple rules by which each fish reacts to those around it.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 4:17 pm
11 Dec 2008
We've already got commercial "ice men" delivering.
Some buildings make ice/cold water at night which is then used to assist AC during the peak hours. (I think I've seen a residential version being advertised, not sure.)
jimbeyer's problem with the smart grid seems to be centralized control/top down/big brother stuff.
I just don't see how we get around some input from above. The utility company is going to know that power is going to be cheaper between 01:15 and 01:55 and then spike up for a hour or so tonight.
That there's a system approaching the wind farm and power is going to be very cheap about three hours later.
That's the information the "ice man" needs to save us money.
jimbeyer seems to want to set his timer manually and take his chances that he can guess the sweet spots....
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amazingdrx Posted 4:35 pm
11 Dec 2008
Your individual home smart grid computer would know how much power you would need and when, to keep that "ice" from melting.
It's a much more reliable model because it responds to changing conditions. In summer heat in Pheonix the huge cooling demand fried the grid transformers. A smart grid would store cooling capacity at night and offset the peak demand with that storage. it would also use ground source cooling, that uses maybe 10% of the power of air conditioning.
That's how conservation fits into the smart grid model. Ground source heating/cooling with daily cycle storage.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Pangolin Posted 8:30 pm
11 Dec 2008
You bring the appliance home, plug it in and it looks for mama and sends a ping to whatever local network it finds. This has huge advantages with sprinkler timers as they could talk to the weather station about how much water to put out.
This works for power generation also. I know a guy who's working on solar panels that call the shop when they get dirty or a section is getting too much shade.
Of course vastly larger amounts of energy can be saved by tyeing building thermal systems to ground loops. Swapping out to the most efficient lighting and replacing dated and faulty refrigerators and water heaters. This stuff sounds cool but it's the parsley on the pigs ear at a luau. Not the meat of the issue.
Put the Carbon Back
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Bob Wallace Posted 1:33 am
12 Dec 2008
Thinking about all this some more, I'm now thinking that our individual settings will probably live in the clouds. Bring a new refer/dishwasher home, plug it in, and access your personal password protected cloud site.
Your new whatever gets recognized and registered to your system. You adjust the defaults as/if needed.
Keeping the settings in the cloud would mean that you could tweak stuff from anywhere in the world with a variety of devices - cell phone, office computer, netbook, ....
The utility company would be able to read your defaults and use that data to determine their power needs very fine scale. And they could send out signals to your AC/whatever to turn on/off based on your default settings and current conditions.
I'm hoping that there will be a way to create your own non-cloud control system.
There are people like me who probably will never connect to the grid. (It would cost me between $300k and $500k to hook up.)
And it would provide an escape for the paranoid. They could just run their stuff as they wished and pay a bit extra for the power.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:37 am
12 Dec 2008
Since the smart grid needs internet signal anyway to operate, why not send all information over the power grid? Maybe Austin can get this going? I like the experimental model they have in mind.
Internet over power grid has already been around for a decade or so. That's one huge antennae for broadband wireless signals.
Of course cable and phone companies would fight it tooth and nail, but they can run their business over it too. The opposition would be similar to oil, coal, and auto industries to alternative energy.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 1:50 am
12 Dec 2008
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1034_3-5163739.html
This was all set to take off in 2000, but the guys who get their emails printed out by their assistants so they can read them were appointed.
Instead of the guy who "invented the internet".
Big telecom and cable interests and big energy interests put the double lobby whanmmy on our new information/energy economy through the auspices of "Darth" Cheney and friends.
You would be connected right now Bob, if the bushwaking wrecking crew would not have been appointed.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 1:56 am
12 Dec 2008
But luckily we didn't mothball our thinking for eight years.
Get ready for some great leap forwards....
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amazingdrx Posted 2:02 am
12 Dec 2008
Look out exxon and aramco, a renwable energy/high tech tidal wave is coming up fast behind you, ride it or get crushed into the coral.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 2:10 am
12 Dec 2008
Tell the saudis and the oil men and the car guys, put all that money you made (or lost because of, in the case of big auto) off of the old energy economy into the new energy economy. Or go the way of the dinosuars.
Pickens seems to get the message already, and he was one of the hardest core duubyites, funding the swiftboating of Kerry.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:20 am
12 Dec 2008
Wang (who used to own desktops) resisted, said that there was no role for computers on desktops, failed.
IBM resisted for a long time. Then got smart and prospered.
Same will happen with other established corporations. Some will get it, some not.
BTW, Exxon has a division working on batteries for BEVs....
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amazingdrx Posted 2:27 am
12 Dec 2008
And locking up the patents in a vault, most likely. As corporations would have done during WW II had they not been impelled to work for the war effort.
These corporate "citizens" need a lecture in citizenship, an FDR style lecture. Obama is the man to do that.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:37 am
12 Dec 2008
Don't buy into that paranoid clap-trap.
Exxon's goal is to make money. They can make money selling oil or they can make money selling batteries.
They very well know that the economies are rapidly tilting in the direction of electricity for powering our personal rides....
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jimbeyer Posted 3:06 am
12 Dec 2008
All the utility needs to provide (for adopting customers) is a real-time price for the electricity, probably clipped to some high (but not astronomical) price for peak events. (I've heard there are a few hours every year which are extremely expensive to provide.)
Your home would then have basically a smart controller which you have programmed for price breaks regarding some appliances/usages. (Smart appliances that can act on their own in this regard will help too.)
In a practical sense, the lion's share of one's electric bill is probably consumed by your A/C, fridge, and hot water heater. A smart fridge would know how long it can be turned off. Ditto for the hot water heater. But these are all consumer CHOICES. An empty house could have it's A/C turned off. A home with an elderly or infirmed person (who needs the A/C to live) can make the decision to pay for the power.
It's a tad more complicated, but much more fair. it will also encourage optimized behavior which will lower overall energy use, saving everyone money.
Build plugin hybrids that run on renewable methane. That's all that's needed.
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