Building the Energy Internet

Ant writes "This article talks about transforming today's dumb electricity grid into a smart, responsive and self-healing digital network--in short, an 'energy internet'."

Comments

Like it is now!

[tarsi210]

...smart, responsive and self-healing digital network--in short, an 'energy internet'.

Oh, you mean like the Internet is now? You mean that when Alter.net takes a dump in Ohio that I will still be able to get to the east coast, albeit through a more round-about way? That even if major fibre in the West gets backhoed that I'll be able to get to Australia, maybe through England first?

Although originally designed to be, the Internet is NOT completely fault-tolerant, smart, responsive, or self-healing. In fact, some parts are downright fragile...hit the right router and a lot of lines go dark.

Now, maybe the electric grid would be easier to make tolerant due to the way the distribution is setup, or maybe not (I'm no expert). Monitoring is all good, but building something that is less likely to break is better. I can monitor my servers all I want and be paged like crazy when they go down, but if I don't have good hardware to start with, I'll be running to work at 3am an awful lot.

Building something that is inherently fault-tolerant seems to me to be a better "first" than just improving the monitoring of an already fragile system.