Adventures in the Smart Grid #1 (Grist)

[jpak]

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/6/8/144854/0193



It's the world's largest machine -- the interconnected network of power plants, transmission towers, substations, poles, and wires that make up the power grid. When you flip the switch you expect the juice to flow and don't have much reason to think about it, except during the occasional blackout. Power engineers and energy wonks might get passionate about the grid, but for most people it's just a background fact of life.

It's time to bring the grid into the foreground, because it positions at the exact center of the world's most crucial issue, global climate change. The power grid is the source of one-third of U.S. global warming emissions. Unless we clean it up we cannot avert severe climate change. The grid is also the key to electrifying transportation and making more effective use of heat generated for buildings and industry, source of the vast bulk of remaining emissions. The grid can be the ultimate climate saver.

But today's power grid cannot do it. A system built on central generating stations, little changed from the first power grids deployed in the late 1800s, lacks flexibility and smarts. We need a new grid capable of networking millions of distributed energy devices such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and smart appliances. We need an internet of energy that employs the latest in digital technologies. We need a Smart Grid.

On August 14, 2003, an overheated transmission line in Ohio sagged into the power grid's greatest natural enemy, a tree branch. The resulting power failure cascaded from the Midwest to Broadway in seconds. Power grid operators were quickly on the phones trying to grope through the grid equivalent of the fog of war, but it was too late. The biggest blackout in U.S. history was underway, leaving 50 million people without power.

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[Greyskye]

1. this is exactly what we have to have

I've advocated an internet-like micro-power infrastructure for quite a while now. This is an excellent paper - wish I'd had it as a resource for past net debates!

Thanks for posting.

[GliderGuider]

2. Resilience theory is once again the key.

Large, efficient, centralized, highly interconnected systems are fundamentally brittle. Resilience theory says you need to disconnect, decentralize and distribute the system so that if one node crashes the failure can't cascade. The resilience that introduces is well worth the loss of efficiency such a change entails. Regional microgrids fill the bill.