[PLUG-TALK] The unstable "smart" grid

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> writes:

Keith> I attended the TiE "smart grid" presentation at Intel Ronler
Keith> last night.  Interesting.  Frightening.  The idea is to use
Keith> computers to regulate usage and make electrical demand
Keith> sensitive to availability through a rapidly adjusting price
Keith> mechanism.  There were so many claimed benefits, it is clear
Keith> that the smart grid will bring about the Second Coming!

Yeah, I considered going to that, but my PTP duties took precedence.

I've heard pitches for smart grid too.  In my case, the talk started
out with a guy talking about CO2 and global climate change and then
deftly started talking about how smart grid could cap/displace the
peak load and eliminate the need to build expensive new power plants.
I buy the second part, and that *does* benefit rate payers, but if your
generation is primarily coal, as it is in many parts of the country,
then the atmosphere doesn't care if you shift the load from 6pm to
midnight.  The same CO2 goes up, no difference.  Now, being able to
manage the load *may* increase the ability or practicality of
utilizing non-fossil fuel energy sources, but I haven't seen that
modelled very clearly or convincingly.

Utilities are pretty good about managing their systems these days.  It
is exceedingly rare to have an outage because of generation issues,
and they have ways of dealing with those scenarios that are crude but
effective, which is to basically dump large blocks of customers
offline (i.e. rolling blackouts).

Mostly what "Smart Grid" is about is about trying to realize the
ability to affect the demand side at a finer-grain than rolling
blackouts, like, by letting them shut off your air conditioner or
dryer during peak load periods, so they don't need to fire up
expensive generation and that is pain-free for their customers.  Tools
like that can make the system more efficient than it is now, where
utility planners have to build lots of excess capacity to achieve
reliability.

I am not concerned about stability issues.  The load side isn't stable
*now*, and utility operators are able to cope with that.

Without having been there, my guess is that last nights presentation
was mostly about how to exploit current buzz and possible federal
investment in pilot projects.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net