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

ARRL concerned over rf interference

[Syntroxis]

The ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) is very concerned about the disruption of various portions of the RF spectrum, particularly HF that police, er, fema, etc. use.

An article regarding their concern is here.

It's called PHM and it's new

[millahtime]

The technology they are reffering to in reality is PHM (Prognostics Health Management) or sometimes called Prognostics and Diagnostics.

This is a form of fault detection that detects something much earlier where you can either go perform maintenance on the problem before it breaks or reroute power from the problem area and go fix it. Either way it keeps the power up and is transparent to the user

Fault detection has come a lot way since the days of the 1950s. Hell it has come a log way from 10 years ago

Say you can detect a problem in the power grid hours or even days before it causes something to break in the grid. You can have a repair guy go out and fix it or if you can't get someone to fix it in time you can reroute power around the problem until you can get it fixed.

From a technical side it can be done and it is a networked approach but nothing says they will use the internet or it will have the same kind of problems from users accessing it.

Assumptions of grid design are becoming false

[Tau Zero]

Moreover, grids are deliberately designed (1950s or not) to channel energy where it's needed. This prevents overloading or underpowering.

I'm sorry, but the second sentence is just false. The assumption of the grid is that there is always sufficient generating capacity to meet the instantaneous demand. If demand exceeds supply for any reason, part or all of the system can be under-powered. This is what happened on 8/14/2003: lines carrying power to portions of Ohio went down, causing local plants to overload and trip off-line and beginning the cascade of failures.

When ever there is a power outage, a grid must be brought back up slowly.

This is why it is so important to prevent large outages. Small-scale load shedding is a vast improvement over any big failure. Systems which can react to an under-power situation fast enough to dump a few neighborhoods or plants before the generators or lines have to trip off will prevent outages from growing larger.

Cutting off customers is a poor substitute for demand-side management. When there's a run on, say, toilet paper or gasoline, prices rise or suppliers run out. Latecomers delay their consumption and everyone has an incentive to decide how important it is to have the goods right now vs. later; there is no way to bring down the toilet-paper supply system. We have no such buffer like this for electricity; because of the false assumption that electricity will always be available when you flip the switch, too many people flipping the switch can cause everyone's power to go down. We need to address this sooner rather than later.

Although I hate calling a bug a "feature", the fact is that blackouts are often a testament to fault-detection which could otherwise overload a grid and cause more substantial problems that would take longer to resolve.

Fault detection is one thing. A faulty response to detection of a fault is another; if the system reacts to a shortage of generation capacity by cutting off generation rather than consumption, the protective systems act to decrease reliability. We may need measures such as mandatory utility control over air-conditioners (the major loads during summer demand peaks) in order to get a handle on this problem.