Power to the People? The "Smart Grid"

Anyone that has ever experienced a power outage is familiar with the general definition of a power grid. I lived in New York City for one of the two major blackouts affecting the entire north east area. While the two blackouts had different root causes, they both resulted in a cascading failure where the load from a failed section was transferred to another. As each transfer occurred, the new line was quickly overloaded shifting that load to yet another line. In the end, nearly the entire northeastern section of America and parts of Canada were affected plunging millions into darkness.

After the 2003 blackout, critics claimed that America was a “Superpower with a third world power grid”. European newspapers noted that America would benefit from a European style system with tighter, safer controls and superior interconnectivity even though that system suffered a similar failure only six weeks later.

The European grid system was the old “new” answer. The new “new” answer is Smart Grid. Smart sounds good. After all, who wants a “dumb” grid system? American’s love smart stuff. The smarter our devices become the dumber we can afford to be and that equals leisure time…maybe.

Smart grid is an interactive, interconnected system that allows for immediate changes in response to load factors. The proponents claim that smart grid will allow us to reduce our dependency on emergency generators needed to augment the available power at peak load periods by better managing the loads themselves, reduce outages through the robust and redundant interconnectivity of the system and reduce the need to expand the existing grid by adding new transmission lines or generating plants. The smart grid will also allow easier integration of alternate energy sources such as wind, solar, tidal and geothermal generating capabilities. This will aid in the reduction of greenhouse gases as we shift from fossil fuels to environmentally friendlier power sources.

Smart grid is a major undertaking. A key component of the system is the household power meter; that friendly little device that measures how much power you use so you can get your billing statement from your equally friendly local utility company. The smart meter would communicate with whatever “smart appliances” you have in your home. We don’t have any of those yet but knowing our even friendlier Federal government, that will probably end up being the only kind of appliance that will be available when this plan is in full swing. The microprocessor driven heart of a smart appliance will undoubtedly add hundreds to the purchase cost of a new appliance. The good news is that no additional wiring will be needed since the communication data can be transmitted digitally as an encoded pulse right through the electrical wiring already in your home where it will be interpreted by the microprocessor in the appliance.

The smart meters communicate peak load information with the utilities and in turn, communicate with any smart appliances in your home causing them to help shed that load by turning off. For instance, during times of peak demand, your smart clothes dryer may react to a request from your smart meter by turning itself off a few minutes earlier. Your smart dishwasher may complete the wash cycle but not engage the heated drying cycle until the network demand is lower. Your smart refrigerator may leave the compressor off a little longer raising the temperature in the refrigerator slightly but still well below safe levels. In commercial applications, smart meters can even be used to dim the lights at the supermarket if the system demands a reduction in load.

So what is the benefit of having a smart meter if you do not have any smart appliances yet? Let’s face it; nobody replaces a refrigerator if it’s not broken and if you have already bought one in the past five years, you are hoping it will outlive you before going through that expense again. This is where the smart meter comes into its own. If the machines are not able to turn themselves off they will give you the tools and the economic incentive to turn them off yourself. Part of smart meter technology will allow utility companies to shift away from having a set fee for power and be able to increase or decrease the price of the power you use at any given moment.

There will be no more “off-peak” hours because the price that you pay will be dependent upon the actual load experienced by the entire system. Of course there will be a monitor in your home that will allow you to see at a glance, just how much you are spending for a kilowatt hour every minute of every day. One thing that is not clear is that since the smart grid has a level of interconnectivity that has never before been achieved in the United States, will peak load be determined locally or as an aggregate figure extracted from the entire system? Will there ever be reduced loads or affordable energy costs if it is always five o’clock somewhere?

The smart meters will not only receive load communications from the utilities to be used to instruct your smart appliances and adjust your billing levels. It will also send communications from your home to the utility companies. This was one of the criteria established for smart grid technology in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Another unknown is the exact nature of the information that the grid will collect from your home, who will receive it and how it will ultimately be used. It could be something as simple as monitoring power usage trends or something as nefarious as using that information to establish personal energy use standards and a penalty structure for non-compliance. No, that is not in the bill; but we have many such standards and corresponding penalties that evolved well after seemingly harmless legislation had already been enacted.

I’m sure you are wondering what this will mean in dollars and cents to you. My comments on the costs associated with this bill in its entirety will be covered in a later post but I will tell you that I have in my possession a very illuminating report prepared by the Senior Policy Analyst for Energy and Environment at the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. This report was submitted as testimony before the House and Senate Western Caucus on July 30, 2009 that will answer all of those questions and more. It is the key part of this analysis and something you will not want to miss.

Next up…….What is a “Green Job”?

Paul