Smart Grid: Digging The Foundations

Nice exposition on the establish players. We can assume that those who benefit from the status quo cannot be relied upon to change it. Our hopes in this area involves some redefinition of the how the power distribution game is played. It would be foolish to imagine that the centralized approach will dissapear anytime soon. But in the quest to make renewables a significant part of the national energy mix, a decentralized approach to power distribution could be an enormous boon. In order for that to happen local energy storage will be key.

I'm talking about game-changing products which give local entities of all sorts, down to individual households, economic incentive to generate their own juice as part of a revamped grid. Nanotech batteries spring to mind, of course, as well as new developments in supercapacitors, and composite material flywheels -- a long neglected tech that's been providing sattelite energy storage for decades now.

You say at one point that "today's grid excludes consumers except as rate payers." That's not quite true. Some utilities will buy back the excess juice their customers produce from photovoltaic or other sources, and I believe some states in fact require them to do so. So there's already some precedence for a grid which can not only dish it out to the provinces, but suck it back up in return. We should be looking to maximize this dynamic.

The greater the extent to which people succeed in producing their own power locally, the better the security of the overall grid will become, not only because the system won't need to strain at the uttermost limits of it's capacity, but because a growing percentage of overall capacity won't be directly dependent on central control. If I'm producing my own juice and a terrorist takes down cybercentral, chances are I'm not going down with it, especially if the new grid has been done right.

The dynamic which should be seeking is the macro equivalent of a hybrid car. Just as a hybrid can can use local battery power as a huge mileage multiplier by repeatedly spurning gasoline to run errands in the hood, so too will a grid richly endowed with local resources be buffered from the sort of wide-area brittleness our current balls-to-the-wall centralization breeds. There an important national security argument to be made here. We can use decentralization to discourage not only catastrophic breakdowns in general, but terrorists who aim to attack infrastructure in the interest of creating catastrophes!

Interoperability, as you note, is key. Seems to me this is an open & shut case of proper governance. We can't tolerate systems which don't play well with each other. As for the IT approach, as a computer geek I'm all for it, and it sound fine in theory. But it seems to me that a note or two of caution is warranted. First, physical INERTIA is a tremendous problem dulling the prospects of the most brilliant theory. Where the smart grid is concerned, much will depend on a new generations of products with the requisite intelligence built in, things like smart refrigerators which can back down their power requirements a bit in the face of a brown out. The theory is fine, but it will be years before such refrigerators are in the field in serious numbers. I also suggest is that we need to ground ourselves in the realization that America is the Saudi Arabia of wasted energy! We're great at coming up with cool ideas about how stuff might work. But what's really pressing right now is to fix what's leaking!

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is accepting public comments on the interim roadmap. Comments must be received on or before July 30, 2009. Send comments to: smartgridcomments@nist.gov

Distributed generation and distributed storage of energy are critical parts of the Smart Grid vision. Buildings may be both producers and consumers and energy, and intermittent power sources, such as wind and solar, will account for growing shares of the energy supply. Distributed generation will make energy flows on the Smart Grid more complex than today, posing difficult challenges for managing power reliability and quality. Through demand-response and dynamic-pricing mechanisms, owners of commercial and residential buildings will be able to respond to time-based price signals that encourage them to reduce or shift energy usage during peak demand periods, when rates are highest.

These and other Smart Grid capabilities are anticipated to spur innovation in energy-related building technologies.

I read with interest up to the point where you equate the concept of a smart grid for electricity with security. At that point, my suspension of disbelief broke.

Computers are by their very nature vulnerable. The classic line is, "There are two types of computers - those that have been compromised, and those that will be". Why should we put something as life-threatening as the electrical distribution network at risk any more than it currently is today? You're talking about centralizing to improve security. What you're also doing is upping the price of any failure of security.

You're also going against the last quote in your article, where Bob Metcalfe said "go distributed". Note that this IMO doesn't modify the risks and challenges, just changes from the 'left hand' set of problems to their mirror image 'right hand' set of problems.

Sincerely,
John B