GE And Google Announce ’21st Century’ Electricity System
Blaise Zerega says let the energy search begin. In a marriage of old and new economy, Google and GE today announced a partnership to promote sustainable energy. With the ongoing financial turmoil as a backdrop, both companies are coming together to collaborate on new, renewable technologies that could, ultimately, deliver energy independence and help our economy. Read the full article >>
This is an encouraging event - GE and Google getting together to lobby the Federal Government to pay attention to modernizing our Electricity infrastructure. Could there be stranger bedfellows? Regardless, anything and anyone who can bring this topic to the forefront of media and politics is all right by me. If I’ve got the message of this particular partnership right, it goes something like this:
If we invest in the “Smart Grid” then we can use it to flip the transportation industry away from oil based fuels by switching to Electric cars and PHEV’s. Given all the hoopla around gas prices and Middle Eastern oil revenues, I can see how this has come together and is getting great media attention. The fact is, this notion of a Smart Grid has been around for awhile, and is long overdue to get its day in the spotlight. Seeing one of the newest Fortune 500 companies partnering on something this big with one of the oldest Fortune 500 companies has me inspired to write a 4 part series on the smart grid. I’ll try to sprinkle some good articles into this over the next week or two.
Let’s first break the “Smart Grid” down into 4 main parts: Power Generation, The Transmission & Distribution System (or lack therof), Smart Metering & Delivery, and the Communications Network that will connect all these assets and devices into an automated and intelligent control center at the heart of each Utility and regional ISO (is a Federal center needed? I wonder.).
Part 1: Power Generation This has been the focus of politicians, environmentalists, and Silicon Valley investment capital over the last 3 or so years (have you heard the term “Clean Tech”?). First off, building new generation isn’t easy or fast (even clean types). There are many hurdles which the government could streamline; one is that federal permitting guidelines should be defined for state and local governments to simplify the NIMBY problem (not in my back yard). There are some real opportunities around Generation though that are worth mentioning. There is a new trend that has a lot of potential called “Distributed Generation”. It solves the problems above in a totally different way. First off, distributed generation is really the notion of many small generation plants. One example is small building generators that are usually sitting idle except in emergencies. There are now commercial programs between Utilities and their large Commercial and/or Industrial customers where if the Utility needs more power (during peaks), they will pay their customers, and pay them enough to turn on their power generators for a period of time. This is called Demand Response in industry jargon. (See www.aeris.net/articles/demand-response.html for an overview of Demand Response). Another and more powerful type of distributed generation is the notion of solar panels, small windmills, and PHEV’s at each home. In this new paradigm, the customer becomes a part time supplier of electricity. Pretty cool, but you need widespread adoption to create any real MW capacity that matters. If the government is going to continue to subsidize ethanol, then they really ought to get behind residential solar and wind. The economics and environmental aspects are so much better than ethanol (for a fun comparison see: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question638.htm).
Now all this is good, but it ignores a major fact that no one likes to talk about. The fact is that we actually have more electrical generation capacity than we USE (didn’t say need) on average. Keep in mind that electricity cannot be stored on a large scale basis (no battery plantations that I know of), so the real-time generation must be consumed right away. This puts pressure on the Utilities to plan the supply-demand curve on a daily basis. So, how are they doing? Well….not so good. The average utilization of capacity across the US electrical industry is hovering around 46%. That’s worse than the airline industry used to be (think of the days of half empty airplanes). Andy Grove is probably right, in that we have generation capacity today to support 70 million electric vehicles. The problem is that we need to get our utilization rates up through better efficiency and automation to balance out the peaks and valleys in the load curves.
In part 2, I’ll talk about how this utilization problem is manifested in the second major component of the Smart Grid, the Transmission and Distribution System. After that, I’ll talk about how we address it at the Smart Metering & Delivery end. And finally I’ll write about the need for an integrated approach to communications and systems to tie the pieces together.
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