Innovation We Need Badly: Smart Grids

TW: Economist wrote a long piece on what is hugely important energy initiative- smart grids. We tend to think of energy mostly as a supply problem but like many other products, its distribution network is also very important. The electrical grid by which electricity reaches consumers is not very different structurally than the grid of the 50's and 60's, this is about to change and needs to change.

Improving the grid will reduce transmission leakage, increase capacity to enable new alternative power sources (i.e. wind and solar) and perhaps most importantly create two-way communication between users and suppliers to facilitate much higher efficiencies. I will have additional posts from this piece soon.

From Economist:

"AROUND the world billions of dollars are being invested in clean-energy technologies of one sort or another, from solar arrays and wind turbines to electric cars. But there is a problem lurking in the power grid that links them together. Green sources of power tend to be distributed and intermittent, which makes them difficult to integrate into the existing grid. And when it comes to electric cars, a study by America’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) found that there is already enough generating capacity to replace as much as 73% of America’s conventional fleet with electric vehicles—but only if the charging of those vehicles is carefully managed. In order to accommodate the flow of energy between new sources of supply and new forms of demand, the world’s electrical grids are going to have to become a lot smarter.

Even though the demands being placed on national electricity grids are changing rapidly, the grids themselves have changed very little since they were first developed more than a century ago...

...Most people have little idea how much electricity they are using until they are presented with a bill.

...Adding digital sensors and remote controls to the transmission and distribution system would make it smarter, greener and more efficient. Such a “smart grid” or “energy internet” would be far more responsive, interactive and transparent than today’s grid. It would be able to cope with new sources of renewable power, enable the co-ordinated charging of electric cars, provide information to consumers about their usage and allow utilities to monitor and control their networks more effectively.

...What exactly would a smart grid look like? Many of the changes would be invisible. On the transmission and distribution side, sensors and digital relays installed on power lines will enable utilities to operate systems with greater efficiency and reliability...Devices called synchrophasors can sample voltage and current 30 times a second or faster—giving utilities and system operators a far more accurate view of the health of the grid. A broad deployment of synchrophasors could be used as an early warning system to help halt or prevent power surges before they develop into massive blackouts, says Jeff Dagle of PNNL... "