Slashdot Mirror
Smarter Electric Grid Could Save Power
Wired has a timely story about putting more of the automated and non-automated decisions behind the use of electrical power into and around households. From the summary: "If the electric grid stops being just a passive supplier of juice, consumers could make choices about how and when to consume power. Power providers and tech companies are working to redesign the grid so you can switch off your house when high demand strains the system, or program your house or appliances to make that move."
A similar story is featured right now on PhysOrg, highlighting a particular pilot project involving "smart meters" in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
I guess the US electric companies always found they could get reimbursed for expensive peak load plants so they had no incentive to apply intelligence to load management.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Of course it is important to only control the right loads. Water heating is a good candidate, so might be charging electric vehicles overnight. Basically loads that need juice but not necessarily constantly.
Probably a good idea not to do this to TV sets or medical equipment.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The primary benefit from a smart grid isn't so much saving energy as limiting peak demand - but it would help in making best use of intermittent generation (e.g. renewables such as solar and wind).
It's not a matter of turning off all the electricity to your house. It's a matter of running your dishwasher and drier during off-peak hours and cutting back on the A/C during the really peak times. Right not, there are no incentives consumers to time their electricity usage, even though the cost to the utility varies wildly, and the utility is expected to provide as much power as you want. This BTW, is one of the reasons for the blackouts in California. That and the fact the companies like Enron knew this fact and exploited it.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
And you know what the net benefit is of that? Higher power bills for the remaining people who do not generate their own power.
I didn't believe it either, but NPR did a story on it a few days ago. Basically the power companies are REQUIRED to pay higher prices back for people who sell them back power... up to 7x in some cases. This means that the additional cost they pay OUT, comes right out of the pockets of everyone else. It's only $2-$3 per-month for most people, but that could still mean quite a bit if spread over a small town of subscribers.
It's funny... we start using corn to produce ethanol, and people in Haiti and Darfur end up starving. We go green by producing our own power, and we end up paying more for it anyway.
Seems like there's always someone looking to get ahead, by screwing over everyone else in the process.
In order to effectively balance sources from grid-tied power sources, such as wind and solar, the grid needs to be re-engineered. Load balancing is a part of this. Decentralized power has some enormous advantages.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
well large apartment communities are a place to start. Here in texas we have hundreds of large multi-unit communities. They almost all have terrible windows, doors and insulation. Require them to all have double pained glass ( instead of the large single pain sliding glass doors on the balconey) and decent insulation. I used to rent one of those and my 800 sq ft apt had a higher per month bill than my parents 2500 sq ft house did. And frankly that house was not all that well insulated either and it had an ancient AC unit from the 70's.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
Would you set a kettle on to boil all day, in the off chance you might want a cup of tea too?
Frugality is a virtue, gluttony is not.
Were that I say, pancakes?
The nature of power plants (turbines, etc) makes them plenty scalable, within a range of possibilities. Building more plants (or generators within plants) requires a massive new capital investment, as well as environmental compliance.
There is no type of currently-available power plant that is infinitely scalable without further capital investment--solar is limited by how much sunlight is shining, wind by how much wind is blowing, hydro by friction of water flowing through a finite pipe, nuclear by turbine and heat dissipation capacity, gas by turbine size, etc. You can't just dump more fuel into any of these systems and expect a positive response.
I cry foul!!
The plants were designed to be scalable, and they did plan for growth.
Then a funny thing happened. Environmental-whackos stepped up and put a stop to all new electrical generation plants for a period of around 15 years. You couldn't even expand existing plants during this period.
Only when things started getting really bad, and California blacked out a couple times did the rules start to loosen.
Hell it was probably you marching up and down with your scruffy beard and cardboard sign in college that stopped infrastructure development for all we know.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
it sounds like what we have in this country is a shortage of capital. Rich people all have the best insulation, etc because they can afford to spend the initial big bucks to save more down the road. But this hurts us all because most people can not. We need an orginazation to provide more capital for poor or working class americans to conserve. This would help the economy and the enviroment, plus ease financial burdens on lower income households.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
With a tank system you can spread the heating over the night (eg. turning on each tank for an hour means that you can service perhaps 6 times as many customers with the same peak load).
Most retail suppliers get charged some multiplier of their peak load so are very keen to keep peak loads down.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Do you want to save power - here's an easy solution, make devices that actually TURN OFF. Most TVs, DVD players and other electrical devices use almost as much power when they are "off" as they do when they are on. While some devices always need to be on (e.g. tivos, routers, etc...) most would work just as well if there was a way to turn them fully off.
Capacity costs money. When it goes idle for 16 out of 24 hours, it's just a dead weight. Base load plants are generally more economical than plants that can easily adjust their output, so peaks genuinely cost more to cover in any event. If they want to offer customers a discount to help them shave the peaks and avoid the outlay, I fail to see the problem.
I don't think the plans that essentially have homeowners buying on a commodities market are likely worthwhile. People already have jobs, becoming ameteur commodities traders in the off hours is a bit much to ask.
Hoever, simple things like a different rate during set peak hours can work well. Most households can delay laundry and dishwashers until the evening or early morning. Many do anyway because people are at work.
True.
It takes money to save money.
In Washington State, power companies (Puget Sound Energy for example) paid for all the CFL bulbs you could carry away as long as you paid the sales tax on the bulb.
These things are do-able today, without major changes to the grid, or the buildings, or anything else.
Of course, CFL bulbs are not without a down-side, namely the mercury in side. Power companies are also stepping up to recycle those, but I bet most end up in the trash.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
we should also mandate all new water heaters be tankless by 2015, or sooner
Maybe on new construction, but it's not a simple plugin replacement for a tank. Anyway, why choose a particular technology over another? If you care about energy efficiency, just mandate that the efficiency of the water heaters be above a certain percent. We do it with refrigerators, why not water heaters?
AccountKiller
Figures don't lie, but liars figure. They are required to pay more than wholesale because they charge the customers more than wholesale. It's a simple matter of fairness and incentive. Why would I find it fair to sell power TO the grid (often during peak houre when it costs the MOST) at $0.02/KWh and buy it back at $0.14/KWh (at night when it's cheap)?
If the power company buys excess power at retail from home producers, they STILL gain because it helps them shave the peaks.
I'm not a specialist in electric power, but here in Switzerland we have what we call are "Pumpkraftwerke".
They are basically water powered generators utilizing a large storage lake - when demand is high, the water runs from the upper to the lower lake, creating electricity. When demand is low, the water is pumped from the lower to the upper lake.
They require a large difference in height between the two seas (usually in the lower hundreds), but otherwise are pretty low maintenance.
There _is_ of course some ecological impact. But they have served us well during the past years.
One problem is that the peak and average demand on the power grid are quite different. Obviously we have to build the grid to handle the peak, or we'll get blackouts/brownouts. Now what something like this could do is help reduce peak demand. Try to balance things out so that there isn't as much usage during peak times. This in turn means we don't have to spend so much money building out more electrical distribution and production.
This is already done on a large scale in the US. For example grid controllers will talk to a company about shutting down part or all of their usage at a certain time. A good candidate might be something like a food processing/storage facility. The controllers ask them to shut down their coolers at the time when homes are kicking up their usage (like around 4-7 PM). This isn't a problem for the company, they just cool it down a bit more before hand, and the temperature stays low enough.
Well a similar thing could be applied to houses as well, in theory. Shut down or reduce certain things during peak times, or zone the usage so only part of the homes in a given area are using it at once.
I'm not saying it is a cure-all or that we want it doing things like shutting down air conditioners for 3 hours in the desert or something, but there is potential to balance things out better and thus save money.
They do plan for it - and is the reason "grids" came about in the early days of electricity ... industrial loads tend to run somewhat opposite times of residential loads, and thus much of the time, base-plants, despite often not being that scaleable, can economically cover much of the load without problem.
... it's typically only extreme cold or hot weather that leads to excessively high peak loads, though many transmission operators mitigate such extreme situations by directing industrial users to shed load and/or slight voltage reduction.
So while people use more power at night, many industrial users tend to use less, so it evens out most of the time.
The tricky time is late afternoon / early evening where peak loads can occasionally spike significantly requiring the extended use of peaking power plants, such as gas fired units to cover the shortfall at much higher expense...
However, on many grids in the U.S., most days, such peaks are not a big issue
Ron
The environmental wackos had little to do with the blackouts in California. The problem was that the state took forever in deregulating the power sector, so that no one wanted to build a power plant for five years because they knew they would be forced to sell it due to deregulation (which required each utility to own plants corresponding to 50% of power it sold).
There's two issues here. One is reducing the total energy consumed (i.e. not using it at all) and the other is reducing the peak power (choosing when to use energy). The former is always useful. The latter mainly works around infrastructure problems. In terms of reducing emissions, the only reasons I can see for changing when to use energy is to balance the load for "green" energy like wind/solar that aren't available all the time.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Environmental-whackos .... Only when things started getting really bad, and California blacked out a couple times did the rules start to loosen.
No. Enron, amongst other crooked energy traders, and the states that enabled them (Hello Texas!) stepped up. California wasn't counting on being screwed over by its fellow states (as in transmission lines deliberately scheduled to block power going *into* CA during peak times).
The California blackouts were caused solely by criminals doing criminal acts. There was plenty of power otherwise.
If anything, California has since realized that it needs more of its own power generation facilities to protect itself from its neighbors that would sell it down the river (more literal than you know) in no time flat.
Any technology that requires heating large quantities of water will not be instantly scalable yet can still be used for peaking (high load hours).
Gas fired electrical generation plants can respond faster than Coal fired ones, and Nuclear (contrary to your assertion) can also respond quite quickly to additional demand.
All of these require that their boilers be kept at or near steam temperature at times when peaking is likely to be necessary.
About the fastest responding technology is hydro power. Penstocks can be opened and turbines spun up in less than 5 minutes.
Current electrical generation capacity is "scaled" by replication. As a utility approaches 100% utilization during peak periods it starts planning another generation plant. These things 1 year to design, 2 years to build, and 15 years to get permission to build. By that time the design is obsolete.
The problem is one of NIMBY, pure and simple. It will take several California brownouts before the political hacks get out the the way and let the engineers do their job.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
> California has since realized that it needs more
> of its own power generation facilities to protect
> itself from its neighbors
But this is exactly what I was saying.
California had long had the practice of dis-allowing new electrical generation plants anywhere in the state by tying them up in such a morass of regulation that it was effectively impossible to build new plants there.
This was done intentionally to push the generation plants (and the associated pollution) out of their back yard into someone elses.
Why should Texas, who built and owned their own plants and transmission lines (and who, for a long time saw no need to tie into the national grid) be forced to deliver electricity to California SIMPLY so that California could avoid pollution. Texas didn't escape the pollution. They had gas and coal fired plants belching 24/7 so California could flip the switch but never see the smoke stack.
California got exactly what it deserved. Washington, Oregon, and even Montana also faced increased rates due to California refusing to improve its infrastructure.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What we need are some REAL leaders and not just spineless congress critters.What we NEED is some leaders who will say-"We NEED safe affordable power and a good modern infrastructure. So we ARE going to build new nuclear power plants where they can be the most benefit,while putting more research into both alternatives and safer nuclear power designs.We ARE going to rebuild our failing bridges and roads,and we ARE going to have a national broadband infrastructure so we can compete in modern society!" What we NEED is a leader who'll tell all the NIMBYs to take a hike and do what is best for the nation.
But,sadly,I doubt that is going to happen. Instead we'll get more wars over the ever dwindling oil reserves,more finger pointing and useless rhetoric,and we'll slowly slip farther and farther behind everyone else as we slowly turn into just another third world dictatorship. I truly hope that I'm wrong. I truly hope we'll get leaders that can look ahead and think long term instead of simply looking at the next election cycle and the enrichment of their friends and ways to ever increase their powers over us. But I haven't seen anything in a long time that would make me believe it just won't keep going the way it has for the past couple of decades. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Of course, CFL bulbs are not without a down-side, namely the mercury in side. Power companies are also stepping up to recycle those, but I bet most end up in the trash.
The mercury "downside" is usually overblown. When compared with the amount of mercury (or any other toxin) that would be released into the environment due to a standard incandescent's power requirements, the CFL actually comes out ahead. And for older folks, the mercury amount is magnitudes less than the amount in the old thermostats and thermometers. Did you call Hazmat when you broke a thermometer? I doubt it, even though we all knew about mercury poisoning.
Ask TreeHugger: Is Mercury from a Broken CFL Dangerous?
Urban Legends Reference Pages: CFL Mercury Light Bulbs
Why Use CFLs? Environment
Do handle light bulbs with care. However, clean-up procedures are fairly simple if one breaks. And bring old bulbs to a recycle center.
Also, don't forget to recycle all your appliances, electronics, and batteries. The chemicals and elements contained in those are just as hazardous to your health and to the environment, if not more so. The places that take these items also take the CFL bulbs.
IMHO, to prevent instabilities and peaking, system can not be left blind and non-cooperative. We should have an integrated intelligent system for power delivery:
...) on low price/priority settings and our immediate need appliances (hair dryers, computers, lights, microwave ovens, ...) on high price/priority settings.
There should be an asynchronous handshaking protocol for appliances to request exact amount of additional power from the grid and to postpone activation before the grid acknowledges that it is ready to supply it.
Furthermore, when load intensifies, in order to prevent "starvation" of new appliances waiting to be switched on, all appliances would have to be able to gradually scale down their consumption on demand from the grid.
Alternatively (/additionally), there should be "power bid" system: consumer should set the limit for the price of a watt consumer is willing to pay for given appliance (according to consumers' own priorities and preferences) and then the grid could clear the overload by raising the price (thus pushing of-grid appliances with lower priority set by their respective owners) in real time.
Obviously, we could set our low priority "batch job" appliances (dishwashers, clothes washer/dryer,
Interestingly, this system could also allow small/micro/local rapid response energy producers and merchants (buying low, selling high, provided they have efficient energy storage/retrieval systems) to compete on the "watt market" and offload the system, thus creating new opportunities, better energy supply and more accurate cost management.
For instance, we could also express the timing in monetary equivalents: you can buy immediate power from small producer or merchant now, for higher cost, or you can book lower cost watts delivered from huge power station at some later time, when they are ready to deliver some extra power. In short, if you can tell exactly how many watts you need, for how long and you can afford to wait some time to get it, you could get yourself significantly lower cost.
Exactly. I live in Texas, and if you don't want to pay through the teeth for polluting our land for your cheap electricity then eat blackouts.
Stop building power plants, then regulate how much suppliers in your state can charge the people. What could go wrong?
Did Enron screw California over? Yep, don't like it? Fix your goofy ass laws, and build some infrastructure. It's the same exact thing that's happening right now in the oil market. In the U.S. we stopped building any infrastructure in refining or producing, now idiots are crying that someone else controls the price of their fuel.
Actually, the scalability is the problem right now. If you are a muni, then sure, you can get the meters and the corresponding backhaul for one city from one vendor. The scalability issue comes in when a bigger utility like SCE or PG&E need 1M-5M of these meters to create a homogenous environment. None of the vendors, even the big ones like Itron, can produce that many yet. So we wait while the vendors ramp up production. Meanwhile all of the mid-sized US utilities are starting their AMI projects, and Europe is ramping up with these things too straining the supply as well.
Population density also matters. Again, if you want a homogenous environment, and you cover a rural area, it is going to cost you.
If you are curious, here is a Google Map thingy someone developed to track all of the Smart Metering project going on out there.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
And once running, 200MW turbine can change its production for 5MW (2.5%) in just 4 seconds! Probably even faster, but that was a limit that we had to obey when we were controlling power system frequency in Serbia.
No sig today.
I've got mod points, but it's better to reply in my capacity as a controls engineer working in sustainable energies, then just mod you down.
As debatable as it is whether CA utilities did or did not build for excess capacity, it is quite frankly irrelevant. The kind of excess capacity that they would have planned for would have not been what we needed then, and especially what we need now.
We need measures to reduce energy consumption and measures to better use what we've got. Thermodynamically, a big plant isn't anywhere near as efficient running a small load, than a small plant running a small load. Ideally, we'd be able to generate 95% (I made that number up out of thin air. 100% is of course ideal, but obviously not attainable) of our energy with base-load plants and only occasionally spin up small gas turbines for the peak loads. While smart grids do nothing for the former (unless people just become more aware of the cost and thus reduce usage) they certainly do help with the latter. A washing machine run at 3AM, for all intents and purposes, is ready in the same amount of time as one that was started just before bedtime.
A good place to look is island grids. Many islands literally do not have a second source of power, so they have to specify their one plant to handle both base and peak load. This is increases capital costs and reduces efficiency at base load, increasing recurring costs. And they can't even sell excess capacity, so the island utility is really pushed up against a wall. Unless... unless you do something to spread out the load. Because, let's face it, an island grid is actually pretty nice from a simplicity standpoint because there are a lot less unknowns. No trains, little industry, just a lot of washing machines and air conditioners.
So, in short, placing the blame on someone else is not the answer. Conservation is not a virtue, and global warming and energy shortages don't stop at our borders. Smart grids are coming and are in fact a very good solution to many of our capacity problems. While they don't help save power use, they do make the usage more efficient.
P.S. As an aside, it's unfortunate that the last, least important step-- time optimization--, is being done first. If people would just put that damned ADSL modem on a timer (mine uses as much energy in a day as my refrigerator), unplug chargers they're not using, and put the computer in hibernate mode at night, that would do far more than time-optimized smart energy.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Woah woah woah.. Who decided that 78 degrees is the target here and that less than that is "unacceptable?"
Humans are most comfortable at a "room temperature" of 72 degrees, on average. At 78, you're going to have nearly one standard deviation of people that are actually sweating (and not necessarily just the fatties, either). I think we can all agree that office stench is also important to keep down.
The problem is manifold, as like I often say, "You can always put on another sweater. You can't take off more clothes than all of 'em."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Actually, as a German I'd say that America could save a lot of money by actually building houses. Seriously, the typical US American house would be called a very large garden shed in Germany - sometimes the only thing between the facade and the interior is a bit of drywall. In comparison, in German houses you can usually expect about thirty centimeters (about twelve inches) of aerated autoclaved concrete, which is a very good insulator; the roof is usually insulated with mineral wool.
In general, our houses have greatly superior insulation and, if you're smart about when to open your windows, are mostly independent from the temperature outside. Granted, our houses cost half a million bucks but they're something you build to live the rest of your life in.
Of course Germany isn't Florida with its hellish^Wtropical climate, but even in areas where aerated concrete, mineral wool and properly insulated windows can't keep your house cool they can reduce the need for air conditioning.
Of course this doesn't work in those rather large parts of the USA where you have a fair chance of having your house destroyed by a tornado/hurricane/massive flood/earthquke/other natural disaster; at least not if you can't stand dropping a few hundred grand on a house every few years.
A comparatively cheap and easy thing you can do is to apply mineral wool wherever possible. If you can find them, that it; when my brother installed the stuff in his house a few years ago he couldn't find a retailer who carried it in the Indianapolis area.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)