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

The Text... (For the Access Impaired)

[Kjuib]

ENERGY Building the energy internet Mar 11th 2004 From The Economist print edition Energy: More and bigger blackouts lie ahead, unless today's dumb electricity grid can be transformed into a smart, responsive and self-healing digital network--in short, an "energy internet" "TREES or terrorists, the power grid will go down again!" That chilling forecast comes not from some ill-informed gloom-monger or armchair pundit, but from Robert Schainker, a leading expert on the matter. He and his colleagues at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the official research arm of America's power utilities, are convinced that the big grid failures of 2003--such as the one that plunged some 50m Americans and Canadians into darkness in August, and another a few weeks later that blacked out all of Italy--were not flukes. Rather, they and other experts argue, they are harbingers of worse to come. The chief reason for concern is not what the industry calls "poor vegetation management", even though both of last year's big power cuts were precipitated by mischievous trees. It will never be possible to prevent natural forces from affecting power lines. The real test of any network's resilience is how quickly and intelligently it can handle such disruptions. Think, for example, of the internet's ability to re-route packets of data swiftly and efficiently when a network link fails. The analogy is not lost on the energy industry. Of course, the power grid will never quite become the internet--it is impossible to packet-switch power. Even so, transforming today's centralised, dumb power grid into something closer to a smart, distributed network will be necessary to provide a reliable power supply--and to make possible innovative new energy services. Energy visionaries imagine a "self-healing" grid with real-time sensors and "plug and play" software that can allow scattered generators or energy-storage devices to attach to it. In other words, an energy internet. Flying blind It sounds great. But in reality, most power grids are based on 1950s technology, with sketchy communications and antiquated control systems. The investigation into last year's North American blackout revealed that during the precious minutes following the first outages in Ohio, when action might have been taken to prevent the blackout spreading, the local utility's managers had to ask the regional system operator by phone what was happening on their own wires. Meanwhile, the failure cascaded to neighbouring regions. "They simply can't see the grid!" laments Clark Gelling of the EPRI. Even if operators had smart sensors throughout the system, they could do little to halt problems from spreading, because they lack suitable control systems. Instead, essential bits of energy infrastructure are built to shut down at the first sign of trouble, spreading blackouts and increasing their economic impact. The North American blackout, for example, cost power users around $7 billion. Engineers have to spend hours or even days restarting power plants. The good news is that technologies are now being developed in four areas that point the way towards the smart grid of the future. First, utilities are experimenting with ways to measure the behaviour of the grid in real time. Second, they are looking for ways to use that information to control the flow of power fast enough to avoid blackouts. Third, they are upgrading their networks in order to pump more juice through the grid safely. Finally, they are looking for ways to produce and store power close to consumers, to reduce the need to send so much power down those ageing transmission lines in the first place. First, to the eyes and ears. With the exception of some simple sensors located at a minority of substations, there is little "intelligence" embedded in today's grid. But in America's Pacific north-west, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a regional utility run by the federal government, has been experimenting with a wide-area monitoring system. Carson Taylor, BPA's chief transmission expert, explains that the impetus