Slashdot Mirror
Microgrids May Provide Distributed Energy
jobcello wrote to mention a BBC article discussing a new technique for power distribution that might provide electricity using a series of small "microgrids", in a manner similar to peer-to-peer software. From the article: "'This would save something like 20 to 30% of our emissions with hardly anyone knowing it ... A microgrid is a collection of small generators for a collection of users in close proximity ... It supplies heat through the household, but you already have cables in the ground, so it is easy to construct an electricity network. Then you create some sort of control network.' That network could be made into a smart grid using more sophisticated software and grid computing technologies."
the RIAA will never allow it...
from the post:
I believe if you'll check the documentation, that sophisticated smart-grid controller software is part of the new Office 12 release.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
a new technique for power distribution that might provide electricity using a series of small "microgrids", in a manner similar to peer-to-peer software.
And you can bet on countless participants finding ways to not share at a 1:1 ratio, just like on most P2P networks...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Then you create some sort of control network."
What sort, exactly; and, will it run Linux?
* * *
Why do sentences like that stick out and yell "inexperienced ding-dongs at work" ??
I've been investigating solar and wind power generation for my home. I'm on an acre and a half, with well and septic. I run some web and mail servers. It would be really nice to be able to have a water supply and electricity supply independent of the grid. If this sort of grid system gets implemented, it may be incentive for me and others to go ahead with local power generation systems so that we can share. I've been reading about in-home control systems that can regulate when and how power is used so that you can immediately get a 15-30% power savings. If this is also done with these micro-grids, a cumulative savings of 50% might be possible. That would be a substantial factor in reducing entropy buildup (emmissions, heat, etc.). Cool stuff!!!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
With such an advanced soceity as we have, its amazing how frail and utterly devistatable our communications and electrical utilies are. With the recent hurricanes, they estimate MONTHS before some places get electricity back. We have the ability to have blackouts the cover entire states.Havnt we learned from google that one huge supercomputer is not better than a million smaller computers? If each city, each neighborhood has a microgrid for power and communications that was burried and belowground, sealed against weather then our communications and electrical infastructure would remain even after huge natrual disasters such as these hurricanes that we have been so blessed with this season.
Problem with this is that 1) most DG networks are microturbines or fuels cells, the customer usually picks up the cost of the fuel 2) current natural gas prices make it expenive as heck 3) strong negative NIMBY because usually they are load (both fuel cells and microturbines) 4) high maintinence costs after a few years for membrane replacement and reconditioning of the turbine. 5) you have to hope your neighbors pay their fuel/usage bills... right now its only really practical for large customers like hospitals and factories and for utilities to reduce local overloads of their system while they wait the requisite 2 billion years to site a new substation
I have always thought that the real revolution in fuel cell tech will be with something like this. Either you can have a fuel cell powered generator at one house, or use a larger generator to power several houses.
In either case it would allow for what I believe is the greatest hinderance to this technology, true energy competition.
Think about it, your energy costs would be completely independent of where you live (except for shipping costs). We could build clean energy supply stations where they will be most effective (say the desert for example) and then contain and ship that energy anywhere using fuel cells.
There are a few hurdles to overcome such as local power monopolies and putting protections in place to make sure 1st world countries aren't just importing from poluting energy sources in 3rd world countries.
But when the technology becomes marketable, this will be a real possibility.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
People supplying energy for the people? Big electric companies will never allow it.
--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, $7,95.
Picaday!!! Strange & sexy pictures (Some NSFW!).
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
My neighborhood has a set of fuel cell generators deployed at a transmssion site up the street. Runs on natural gas. It's an experiment, and probably would not be cost effective w/o state and federal grants.
[Insert pithy quote here]
3 concerns:
1) how much more/less will this cost?
2) is this going to affect, say, the data center that houses 300+ servers, and the guy down the block's electronics? who says the data center can afford the drop in power when he goes to turn on a few high-power units?
3) wouldn't this just make it that much easier for power to be cut as a whole?
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
It would not have to. Just because you lose one generator, does not mean that the grid loses electricity. In fact, the neighboring grids would just provide for it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Where is the dupe? Your post was a dupe to another one from last night. Please consider jumping on an MSN blog site. At this point, I would hate to see TMM get editing if for no other reason then to force you over to MSN.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's really difficult to connect small generators together to form a power network. As any self respecting /. nerd knows, gnerators generate AC power... unlike connecting DC batteries together to form a more powerful source of power, generators have to be synched up exactly in phase. Only the more expensive generators have this capability, which usually requires them to synch up. If one generator puts out slightly more power then the other, the weaker one would act like a motor and suck the power from the stronger one. Getting them to match up and balance the load can be tricky
Tell you what, why don't you log into your account(be it TTM or whatever) , put your money where your mouth is by presenting justifiable evidences, and get beatdown like a man.
If you refuse, then stop trying to force other drink your special Kool Aids; we don't need idiots who chant the same PR for every story.
This seems somewhat far-fetched to me.
From what I remember of physics in highschool, the production and transport of electricity is much more efficient when it is done in high volume with high voltages. In a small grid, you'd lose the benefits of that efficiency. It would also require separate maintenance crews, hardware, etc.
It would also raise concerns about standardization. Will the product I just purchased work on a grid down the street? Would you have to replace your appliances when you moved? The biggest benefit of consolitation is, imo, that you don't have to ask these questions. The systems are large enough to span areas well beyond the majority of general user's environments and thus there are few, if any compatability issues (i.e. Currently, if you leave the country, you might need to change your plug type / voltage, but anywhere in the country it should be the same).
Interruption also raises an issue. I'm inclined to think that a larger factility is easier to keep in operation because it's consolidated and more easily accessed by technicians / engineers / etc.
There are some benefits.
Solar power is made feasible, at least partially, in this case. I've always wondered why we don't all just have solar panels on our houses and batteries in the basements. I suppose that living in Southern California gives me a bit of a bias in terms of estimating the feasibility of such a system, but it certainly seems more reasonable than burning copious amounts of fossil fuels.
There are also other "alternative" power sources listed in the article, although it seems to me that large-scale, consolidated power production is still superior, given that the production facilities are clean.
Having grids separated increases security of those facilities in a disaster as there is no single facility whose compromise would cause a power loss to an entire large grid. With small grids, even if your grid goes down, surrounding grids should still be operational. That does, however, raise concerns about maintenance and repair--who's doing it and when?
Why not nuclear?
Nuclear energy is some of the cleanest and most efficient energy production available. Even with the waste being very toxic, its concentration levels are high. It is arguably easier to control the pollution from nuclear by-products than from a coal power plant. In a well-maintained and operated plant, there is virtually no risk of a meltdown, and I'm sure modern technology can be used to further increase the safety of nuclear power.
Chernobyl is the bloody poster-child of anti-nuclear groups, but that's certainly not par for the course in terms of nuclear power. San Onofre is down here in SoCal, and I dare say we have any mutated sea bass or deathclaw walking around. ;)
My vote is for nuclear, hydroelectic, and other efficient, clean, large-scale power sources, or for solar panels on my roof. It'll be interesting to see how this issue plays out.
an open system would follow an open society and *all* could benefit - wouldn't that be a nice/new way to look at rebuilding of places like NO, and other inner city places. hopeful perhaps, but it'd be a nice application and solve may of society's (current) ills.
fak3r.com
...is curently in space heating and hot water. Solar PV will catch up in a few years with low-silicon panels and mini CPV arrays, but other than the panels which will eventually come back down after the shortage ends, the grid-tie components are for the most part incredibly overpriced.
Even with the price gouging that goes on in the home power industry, though, you can still make solar hot water pay back in a few short years... and of course solar air daytime space heating is extremely cheap since DIY is for some weird reason the only real option available. Horizontal geothermal heat/cool banking ("slinky coils") can self-finance on a home equity loan with their power savings, if you are in the right climate... best to have a pro do a site survey before trying to crunch the numbers on a heat pump system, though.
It's astounding how much of the electricity and fuel we use is just turned straight to heat (or cold), and since heat/cold is much easier to collect/store than electricity, that's where the savings are to be had.
(Though a space heater that ran the current through a massive BOINC parrallel computing array might be an interesting way to avoid "wasting" electricity when heating with it.)
Someone had to do it.
Actually, BitTorrent was created by Bram Cohen (not Brian). You can find his website here.
I keep hearing that 1 large electric plant is better to power transportation than a million tiny gasoline powered generators. In fact, I hear that in here quite regularly.
Why the dichotomy?
Microgrids cannot get very big unless the infrastructure gets much better. The great blackout of August 2003 was caused by one power plant screwing up and then all the other plants powering down to protect their networks. These are huge power plants we are talking about. Imagine one guy who didn't maintain his generator wiping out the microgrid every day!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Nice idea - I have heard that transmission takes about 20-30% of our electrical output (especially when California gets its electricity from the Northern Oregon border, if not even farther away) - so anything to move the generation plant closer to the people that actually use the electricity would be a huge benefit.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I thought the reason we built big power plants was that:
1: By putting all your eggs in one basket and Watching That Basket, reliability was increased.
2: Many small generators would cost more and not be as efficient as one big generator, even allowing for larger transmission line losses.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A company in Australia (http://www.cfcl.com.au/) (and a couple of others) are developing ceramic fuel cells.
Natural gas + O2 = electriicity + high temp waste heat that can heat your water.
Seriously, that seems to be the key here. You will need controllers to synchronize all the generation, but once you do that, then each generator is just like the disks in a RAID array. They can be inexpensive and not super reliable, thereby reducing costs.
The efficiency issues I believe are being overemphasized. Yes, you want high voltage for long distances. But the whole idea here is that you are doing mostly local generation of power, so running power to a few of your neighbor's houses doesn't incur nearly the penalty that you'd get from running the same power many miles. And people often forget that even your efficient power company puts the transformer on a local pole or box in your neighborhood. So the idea actually makes a lot of sense.
Yet none have used to term "Peer-to-Power". I'm ashamed of you Slashdotters, and your lack of obvious punnery.
The reasons are many and varied and mostly center on physics. If you look at best case scenarios with current off the shelf technology and the efficiencies as you scale up, there's a sweet spot where the size versus distribution versus etc. all reaches an optimum level. Our present system is much closer to that sweet spot than microgrids or the other end of the spectrum, one giant planet-wide power station.
We could use high temperature superconductors, fission reactors and with fusion later when they get it to work, and a lot of clearing of the way by the federal government for deployment which is now held up by people using the environment as a smokescreen when what it comes down to is a lot of NIMBY and more to the point a bountiful opportunity for pitiful and pathetic unimportant people to make themselves feel important.
I live in a state where every highway project takes years longer and millions more because the enviros hold up everything *after* the damage is already done until they've milked out the publicity for themselves and finally it gets done in the end and there was no change and nothing saved in terms of environment and plenty of time and money wasted. All for their inane ego festivals.
Right now those same imbeciles are doing everything they can to keep the power transmission companies from fixing outdated and antiquated transmission lines and equipment which first keeps efficiency low and cost of the power transmission high, second it keeps jacking up the danger of massive local outages every year, third it increases the danger to the workers who maintain the system, fourth it increases the chance of creating a regional chain reaction outage, and fifth it increases the chance of a catastrophic failure on one of the big circuits going through the woods and starting a fire.
They are also trying everything they can do to prevent us from tying into regional grids through the west side of CT into New York and across the sound to Long Island. And lastly doing all they can to stand in the way of a gas tanker and pipeline facility. The sanity of putting liquid natural gas ships more than ten miles offshore is obvious in this new age of mega-terrorism and conversely the insanity of making the tankers put into ports near population centers equally obvious. They just don't care. It's all about them.
The best thing we can do with our end of things as consumers is insulate, make efficient use of what we consumer, and use solar electric, thermal, and hydro *where* economical and efficient on our homes. When superconductive storage systems finally come around, we can store the energy compactly that way onsite and until then, unless we want to deal with the danger of poisonous battery chemicals and five thousand pounds of them per home, we're better off simply having a system where we use the energy we generate first and the main grid's power secondly.
But generators aren't going to cut it. We're going from a few hundred stations to a few million and with less efficiency and more pollution and no inspection. Tack on inspection and you can add the psycho enviro leftists to the far right terrorist under every bed paranoids as one more group pushing us closer to a police state; no way would they let fossil fuel generators increase like that without mandating mandatory inspections on your property at any time for any or no reason with no prior notice and reserve the right to shut you down whenever they felt like it.
I don't see a need to create a massive new intrusion on our rights. Like I said, insulate, make efficient use, be efficient in generation where it is fitting to generate it yourself.
Fittingly a lot of the enviros of today were the Mother Earth News types of twenty-five years ago advocating that we all use wood and coal stoves, forge and smelt our own metals, and operate pig farms to feed methane stills. Their former zeal for old low tech is utterly incompatible with their stated beliefs of today. Much like the pictures of them in mullets, gold chains, and neon orange leisure suits were twenty-five years ago.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The utilities will never allow it. Seriously, this is one of their worst nightmares, and one of the major reasons that they consistently oppose programs that promote distributed renewable. They are, for the most part, regulated monopolies. Their political power derives from the fact that, no matter how much they suck, they are the only game in town. Change that, and they start to become superfluous. And they know it.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
But in the States, a pole-mounted transformer may serve only two or threee homes. Here, the technical issues resulting from bridging multiple transformers might make the prospect of a neighborhood-wide grid less economically feasible.
Actually the Mother Earth News types of 25 years ago where exactly the same as they were now: hypocrites who didn't realize that their actions where hypocritical. They were always in favor of pollution restrictions on everything, and being self sufficient on your own wood heat. Both at once.
I remember (Just before the original mother went out of business) their shock when they realized that their efforts to prevent pollution had reached the point where their beloved woodstove was no illegal to make.
In otherwords they were like everyone else. I want to make the world a better place, so long as it doesn't effect me in any way. (Think greenpeace bumpersticker on a SUV)
At my university (University of Colorado at Boulder), we have an on-campus 33MW power plant. Waste heat from the plant is piped around campus to heat buildings, and the electricity generated is enough to power the campus, with 8MW left over that is sold to the grid. The facility also produces chilled water through a massive vapor-phase system that is used to cool the physics and other nearby buildings.