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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'."
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Transforming the electricity grid into the worlds largest human microwave.
RFC3251 - Electricity over IP
Don't do this. Seriously. Building adapting, sentient networks of energy always ends in the Universe being destroted. I KNOW BECAUSE IT HAPPENED TO ME.
...internet..self healing...? well, tolerant to a nice degree in most instances..but healing ?
Now my lamps and appliances can get spammed too. Progress.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
People used to say that when the Internet becomes as invisible as the electricity grid we'll know it has succeeded in becoming an invaluable part of our lives.
;-)
Now people are wanting to turn the electricity grid into an "internet". Does this mean that it will suffer from the same problems in reliability, be difficult to install and that early adopters will bost about "having electricity use at home"??
A little planning goes a long way...
So basically they want to be able to "route" electricity in different directions in case of a power node failure. Opens up a whole new area for hackers. Imagine an eDdos (electric Distributed denial of service) attack on pentagon.
Underholdning.info
To implement a system that would do this wouldn't require any new technology. The ability to sense grid changes before problems occur has been happening in some places for years. The ability to reroute power is already there. It's just a matter of integrating the technology together and installing it all over. That is where the problem would fall as it would cost a lot of $$$$$.
I have seen demonstrations of this technology on a smaller scale already.
Evolution or ID?
I would fear that a "new electricity net" would be less secure than the current control systems because the control nodes would inevitably be connected to the public internet with packets tunneled via a VPN to the central office. I don't see power companies laying their own independent fibers for connectivity. And even if they use their own BPL, there is a good chance the control nodes, sensor nodes, and ccentral office will be connected to what is a public-exposed BPL net. The cost efficiency of routing packets over the public net are just too tempting. Despite best efforts, I'm sure someone will figure a way to hack into the sensor nodes, control nodes, or the central office if it is connected to a public internet.
The current system is more secure (if unreliable and uncontrollable) because compromising it requires physical access.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I disagree with the article - obviously written for a non technical audience.
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.
When ever there is a power outage, a grid must be brought back up slowly. Otherwise, all the lights, motors, air-conditioners, fridges etc. switched on will overload the system and shut it down again - bunnyhopping.
Moreover, grids are deliberately designed (1950s or not) to channel energy where it's needed. This prevents overloading or underpowering.
It just saddens me how absolutely dependent we are on electricity/technology that in an emergency we cannot possibly do without it. How many people have been frustrated that their mail server is down, yet not realised they can WALK over to their colleague and TALK to him?
Powers out... Grab the shotgun!
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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 ex
Now my fridge will get spammed (sic), worms will infest my lightbulbs, my appliances will get deleted left right and centre, and my house will reboot at odd times, being slower to switch back on and losing more electricity points each time it does.
Not to mention the 'Blackout.A throgh Blackout.J' DDoS that's gonna be happening on SCO's HQ...
I wonder how long it will take to write a "energy-equivalent" virus? That could have really terrible effects.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Are you using Internet over Power Lines technology?
C. Griffin
"Can I keep his head for a souvenir?" --Max from Sam 'N Max Freelance Police
An article regarding their concern is here.
Wherever you go, there you are.
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.
Evolution or ID?
Does this mean if a site is slashdotted we can cause a blackout in the surrounding area?
It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them..
Geez. Come on, Dr. Taylor. Just about everyone has some sort of SCADA network (the network of sensors) running on their grid. The blackout started in Ohio because some operators couldn't see some alarms, and the problems cascaded from there. (There are suggestions that some buggy software caused this, but the jury is still out.) The reports that have been released leave many questions unanswered, which tells how complicated and extensive our power grid is.
It will take many BILLIONS of $$ and many years to upgrade things enough to make it what we call dependable. It's complicated enough just keeping local grids running, let alone transferring power from one to another; balancing sources and loads, switching connections at the right time, etc.
- Bill
As power production technology gets less intrusive, it becomes more acceptable to have in a residential neighborhood, or hospital basement. Just as you get better quality of service from a web server down the hall than from one on another continent, a neighborhood fuel cell could provide more reliable power to the customer.
Decentralization is becoming a broad-ranging trend in our society. We have people telecommuting, there are microbreweries springing up all over, and people can make their own diesel fuel in their garages. It is not too difficult to come up with more examples (if you disagree, the same probably holds for counterexamples). On a more political note, this ongoing decentralization helps us reduce our dependence on 'The Man' and increases our self-determination. I, for one, welcome our -- never mind.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Firstly, don't take the internet analogy too far - it's just a system which allows power routing to be managed locally in an intelligent manner, rather than depending upon some central authority. One of the reasons for last year's NW USA blackouts was that data failed to get to the central control centre because of localised breakdowns.
However, decentralised systems can also faile - indeed, given perfect information at the centre (a big given, which often fails) a central overview can outperform a local intelligence. With a distributed system, you would probably get smaller but more frequent outages as local subsystems panic, with a larger total number of houshold outage minutes. This migh, of course, be less damaging if humans don't panic because it is only a few tens of blocks down.
The big potential gain, mentioned lower down in the article, is the potential structural changes to allow small scale generators to generate and distribute power locally. Lots of places have backup power generators, which cut in only when the mains fails. If the economics are right, it would be weorth while their running these continuosly, selling surplus power to the grid, and using the grid as a backup for their own power generation rather than the other way round. This saves the capital investment required for power stations, since it is using capital already invested instead of new capital - which may therefore overcome the diseconomies of small scale. It also saves the losses of long-distance power distribution. However, where you really win is that each area hasa a large proportion of its own power generated locally, so it doesn't care if the grid goes away. Suddently, it soean't matter what happens elswehere. there is also a cewrtain natural balance, as electricity is used in workplaces dirung the day, and when the workers go home the power is available for their domestic evening peak.
The real pie-in-the-sky payoff is when we all get hydrogen-powered cars, which generate electricity for no wear and tear on the fuel cell (we hope). If every car parked at home or work plugs into the grid, you have more generating capacity than you will need in the near future. (It is quoted that the power output of one year of US car sales exceeds the installed generating capacity of the entire world).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Considering the costs involved and the time it will take to get it going, I think wireless broadband is going to beat it to the punch. Wireless Broadband should be pretty heavily installed (kind of like early cell companies, but faster) within the next few years, and with 802.16e coming (mobile 802.16) then it will have yet another advantage over Ethernet over power lines.
:) At least then they won't do it again...hate to be the poor schmuck that has to go check on that equipment outage though.
I'd rather the drunk drivers have to drive a semi into a tower to take my internet out anyways
I think if the IT market moved slower, say stretched out about 10x, then there would have been room for ethernet over powerlines, but as it is it is I think the window of opportuniy for it has already come and will be gone before they manage to get major systems up and running. I've worked with power companies, I know how long it takes them to do anything.
I mean if an OS upgrade requires 6+ months of wait time (not 6 month after it comes out, 6 months after they decide it might be safe to use) and several to many nuclear plants are still running Windows Nt 4, how long do you think it will take for them to decide to do something that will affect all of their lines?
Whee signature.
Now, whether it will stay that way with the lack of investment in England after electricity privatization, who can say.
I'm going to use "open source" electricity, from the wind and the sun. :P
-
The blackout in London, not long ago should be proof enough that the british grid is not perfect.
Concerns about long term blackouts in the future due to our overreliance on gas for power generation have also been raised.
Just search the BBC to see that you really do need batteries in your alarm clock. Even if the supergrid stays up, you will always have local failures. (My power was intermittent this weekend, due to the bad weather)
Philip
Signatures are broken
Encourage people to have power generation in their own homes. Solar panels, generators, etc, designed for home use, would not only ease strain on the grid during hot days in the summer, but would also make their owners money, and make them energy independent.
This would also provide security in an attack, because the entire electrical grid will no longer be supplied by a few power plants that are large targets for any attacker.
The only reason this wasn't implemented during the Cold War is because the technology wasn't there yet, but it is now. And what better way to promote the hydrogen economy that having people put fuel cells on their property to power their house when the main grid fails? People who don't want to have hydrogen in their cars probably won't mind having a tank in their back yard. A lot of people already have tanks of propane for heating and cooking where there's no natural gas service. (Yeah, yeah, I know it's not a cryogenic liquid, but it sure does explode like hydrogen.)
This would create a distributed network of power generation, and no RIAA-like actions by Al Qaeda or Mother Nature would be able to bring much of the grid down at any one time.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Since he knows both about energy and the Internet
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Slightly offtopic, but I recently purchased one of those Phone-Line through the Power Lines adapters from Radio Shack.
What you do is plug one adapter into the wall circuit in a room with a phone jack, and hook the phone line up to it. Then, in another room without the phone jack, you plug the 'receiver' into the wall, and you can plug a phone into it.
Strangely enough, it works. I can even connect to the internet (at 28.8 or less, usually) through this circuit.
BUT - and a big BUT at that, is I keep on getting mixed lines, I hear other people talking on the line, and the most annoying part of it is that whomever's line I am crossed with, when they make a phone call to somewhere else, MY phone number shows up on that person's caller ID. So then I get phone calls at 1am from shady people asking me "Did you call here?!?". At first it was fun listening to their phone calls, apparently someone's boyfriend got caught in a drug deal and needed to be bailed out, but after 4 or 5 of those 1am calls I decided to ditch the whole thing.
So, I for one would not be too interested in this technology unless I see it proven first. In someone else's house. And knowing how bad it worked for the phone, I'm scared stiff to know what people could grab off my line if I use it for the internet.
$.02
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
The power distribution companies are just about the one group who really can afford to run private fibre. After all, they already HAVE cables connecting all the omportant sites, byu definition, and the technology to wrap a fibre around a power line is already well established.
Perhaps its a country-by-country issue. In the U.S., power transmission is a neglected, regulated industry -- its the people that generate the power, not the people that transmit the power, that make all the money. Transmission, at least in the U.S., is a commodity infrastructure and many regard it as underfunded.
But even if the power companies of some countries could afford their own fiber, why would they choose this? And if they do pay to install fiber, why wouldn't they lease unused capacity on this line? To the extent that they either choose the cheaper option (use other's fiber) or lease out their own fiber, they are insecure. Public packets and infrastructure control packets should not be corouted.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The problem with any such scheme is that current motor fuel is derived from a commodity which is rising rapidly in price, and the future panacea-fuel (hydrogen) has very difficult unsolved problems with production and also storage suitable for vehicles.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
FR33 3l3CTR1C1TY F0R H4X0R5!!!
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
.. has no-one behind this idea seen the movie 'Pulse'? Cue a rogue AI hooked up to the power grid, housewives boiling in the shower and garage doors going rogue.
Okay, so the reliability of this information is obviously suspect given the source, but over the weekend I caught an Art Bell show on the radio, where the President of the American Relay Radio League claimed that interference from this kind of power line networking would essentially kill broadcasting in North America over a wide spectrum- if I remember correctly, something like 20Mhz-80Mhz. Art Bell's recap is here.
Looking into it now a little further, some of the American Relay Radio Leauge documents and links has some mentions of problems for radio astronomy and a few other low-profile endeavors.
Anyway, I had no idea this was a possible outcome, and these claims make me think that perhaps it's better to insist that we really work on existing non-interfering technologies before we kill one of the few sections of spectrum that an individual can use on his own.
Check it out, its real:
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/#Video
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
The article is an excellent investigation into the problems of our aging power grids, and draws insightful parallels to the internet.
Unfortunately, The Economist winds up the article with a startling and unjustified leap to the belief that a big-government socialist mega-project is the answer to all of our energy problems. And this in spite of the fact that all of the arguments in the article, especially those that compare the power grid to the internet, point to a smart network of small, local power suppliers as the promising, internet-inspired answer.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
The "electricity internet" scheme comes from the people who think free markets are the answer to everything. When free markets fail, they say they weren't free enough.
That group architected California electricity deregulation, with a power auction every half hour around the clock. Nobody was held responsible for electrical reliability,; the "market" would insure there was enough supply.
This was an absolute disaster. We had blackouts. The biggest electric utilities in California went bankrupt. Rates went up. Even the major energy trader, Enron, went bust. And we're still paying for the mess.
The "electricity internet" scheme is a plan to provide more transmission facilities. But not because they're needed for power engineering reasons. The extra capacity is to facilitate energy trading.
The basic trouble with electricity deregulation is that it encourages building inefficient power plants. Traditionally, regulated electric utilities build mostly "base load" plants, intended to run 100% of the time at high efficiency, plus some less efficient "peaking" plants brought up during peak periods. In a deregulated environment, wholesale electricity prices change by several orders of magnitude throughout the day. The optimal strategy for a generation company is to target only the peak periods, using low-cost plants burning high-cost fuel. (These are usually natural-gas fired turbines.) And there's no money in having excess capacity that's only used a few times per year. A few blackouts a year are to be expected. That's the result of a free market solution.
In Californa, energy traders figured out how to create shortages. Buying, but not using, electrical transmission and natural gas pipeline capacity was one way used to drive up prices.
The fanatical free-market types claim the problem is that the huge variation in daily rates isn't pushed all the way down to residential customers. You'd set your thermostat in dollars per day, and when the power price went up, the air conditioning would turn off. Bigger customers would have energy storage facilities. Most people would just suffer. That's the plan.
I was chatting recently with aon old friend of my fathers, who's been working in the elctricity industry in Europe for 35+ years, including work on the pan-European electricity distribution grid
:)
The anecdote I liked most was this:
- This European grid spans several thousand kilometers, from the Atlantic ocean to Poland at least
- This network can sometimes start to "swing" or oscillate, with Voltage/Amperage swinging back and forth accross the grid, with a period of several seconds
- As we all know (cough) when a system swings like this, with the end points fixed (like one end on the Atlantic and the other in Poland) the maximum amplitude is reached in the middle, lets say at a major cross-border link between France and Germany (yes its not half-way but stay with me)
- Assuming this cross-border link has the capacity to carry 1000 Googlewatts max, they can actually only use it to move 600 Googlewatts around, the other 400 GW have to be reserved to have room up the "swinging" of the whole grid.
- If you were to load this link up to full capacity, and the grid began to swing, it would blow the link up immediately.
- Try to explain this to a politician (or manager), who says "but the wire can take 1000 GW, why can we only transmit 600???"
He also mentioned that in many places, including the US, major grid interconnections are done in Direct Current (DC) to avoid exactly this kind of problem. Just imagine: Gigawatts of power being exchanged in DC - Edison would be proud, and Tesla must be spinning (or oscillating) in his grave
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
Basically, he took his Dymaxion world map projection (one of the only map projection systems to lay out all of the continents on a flat surface with little to no distortion, showing all the continents in true size/proportion/distance to each other), and layed out the major grid interconnects for world power onto it. The idea being that if the world was using one single power system (heh, a logistic problem in itself, what with differing voltages and frequencies), that fluxuations in consumption and use would be smoothed out worldwide because when half the world was at peak, the other half would not be, thus allowing everyone the benefit of everyone's resources - basically a large power sharing network.
Of course, as one reads more about Bucky's ideas and theories, one quickly realizes that what he puts forth is a complete system for living in harmony with the Earth, its resources, and all of the people on the planet - you can't just take portions of his ideas and use them, ignoring the rest. To do so would be folly and would insure that what you were trying to do would eventually fail...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon