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The Grid, Our Cars, and the Net
Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. "'Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,' said Chase. 'It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.' And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. ... Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open."
no longer will we be slaves to the ISPs!
Big ISPs and phone companies have too much to lose to allow this to ever happen.
It would be too hard to be tapped by various 3 letter government agencies so they wouldn't like it either.
Maybe instead of continuing to focus on the dinosaur that is the automobile, more effort should be put into building very a efficient mass transit infrastructure. Just a thought.
Hi there
What we need is to have it integrated into our phones and that we can tether to so:
a) consumers choose phones with over phones without
b) we can use it even outside the car and
c) it's not connected to cars (better to stop the car rebellion right there, tyvm).
I vote thanks but no thanks on this. Despite whatever wild-eyed claims about "openness" or "oneness" or whatever other hippie bullshit the brainchilds of this are spouting, there is absolutely NO information of any kind that is appropriate for my vehicle to be broadcasting. I'm sure the police and Federal government would absolutely LOVE to have a way to track the location of every vehicle in the country, not to mention who owns it and who they're talking to via their built in net cellphone at the time. Integrating this with the idea of a vehicle is a hilariously bad idea, because the instant it comes about there will be DOT, Federal, and State laws with a laundry list of mandates about how "open" this system will be allowed to be to be "roadworthy," and I guarantee you not a single one of these mandates will be in your best interest.
Pass.
If we're going to do the mesh network thing, I'd rather have it in a portable device like a phone or PDA that doesn't give the government a billion inroads to regulate, legislate, and subvert it, and one that I can chose not to buy, to turn off, or to leave at home.
I can't say I completely understand the article. It seems either she, or the person who wrote the article, is confusing mesh networking with power distribution. The article doesn't make clear how the two fit together (maybe someone else who understood can explain better). It talks about wireless networking at the same time it talks about plugging things in. Those two don't seem to fit well together (yeah, I know, some companies are developing wireless electric device chargers, but it's a totally different concept).
One thing that interested me in the article was this quote, " the Obama Administration allocated $4.5 billion in the stimulus bill for smart grid R&D." So we're getting some kind of smarter grid anyway, at least some research into it.
Qxe4
15 years ago when i looked at the literature there were substantial problems with the efficiency of the selected routes, route convergence and message overhead. these things got much worse as the rate of change in the peer graph goes up.
have things gotten that much better?
... will plugging my car into this "mesh" gain me? I don't see a reason for this. It's excessive and prone to more problems than we already have (I guess. I don't even understand exactly what problem she's trying to solve so as to properly determine that). I don't see the automobile in the same light that she does. Just let my car be a car and be powered by my power, Mrs. Xzibit.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
My point isn't that mass transit should be ignored, or that we shouldn't look at doing it in a more effective way where it makes sense, but that wide scale mass transit that has as a stated goal of replacing the automobile in most circumstances, even in rural America, would not be advisable. There are about 303 people per square mile in France (non-euro territories not included), compared to 33 people per square mile in the US (excluding Alaska's area). I've excluded the no-mans-land of Alaska from this equation, but even if you excluded all of the areas where nobody lives in America, you'd still have a significant density difference between France and the US. The issue is not the same here as it is there by a large margin.
The other things is, I was in Pittsburgh in the early 90's during the Port Authority strike - no busses or trains ran in Pittsburgh for a week or more. What I recall is that people found ways to get wherever they needed to go, the air was SIGNIFICANTLY clearer and cleaner without all of the diesel belching busses on the road, and even though everyone had to get to work by private vehicle, traffic moved BETTER, because the slow-assed busses weren't clogging traffic up at every intersection in the city during rush hour.
Folks who write articles about smart grid communicating with cars, etc bring to mind foolish talk of internet toasters and networked refrigerators.
The current electrical grid (speaking of USA; PJM region in particular) is very reliable as it is. Grid operators already have the ability to shape production; with millions of users, usage patterns are easy to spot and plan for ahead of time.
In my view, smart grid and smart meters are simply a way to control people's usage and charging them more; residential electric bills will likely become very complicated.
All this talk about people charging their cars at night and then selling it back during the day for extra credit is nonsense, because when millions of people are charging at night, it's easily conceivable that nightly usage could be just as high as during the day.
In respect to cars communicating with other cars - why? It's obvious that most people will charge their cars as often as possible, even if told not to, in particular, at night so they are sure to have enough charge to get to get the kids to school, get to work, etc.
The internet is another means of communication - it's not going magically solve energy issues nor change human nature.
In my view, a better approach than a so-called smart grid is developing / promoting more efficient energy production methods, in particular nuclear (solar, wind, etc are nice, but are lacking in energy density), along with encouraging people to produce some of their own energy for their needs, such as with solar panels on their roof.
Ron
Having read TFA, it sounds to me a bit like confused meandering of someone trying to figure out how to use some of the stimulus billions for yet another social pet cause, but without the clear definition of what that cause is.
My feelings exactly. It has lots of woo-woo words and ideas which seem magical and yet, I can't understand what the fundamental idea is exactly. --It almost sounds like she's suggesting that we use phone system-like switching technology to route power to individual homes and devices. Sounds bloody expensive to put into place. A high voltage router on every street corner, though I don't really see the advantage, unless each house is also generating electricity. Maybe I'm missing something.
If the concept is viable, then it can be explained in baby terms, which clearly I need. I feel like one of those really thick studio execs guys like Kevin Smith make fun of. So either I'm really, really dumb, the idea needs work, or she needs a good translator to stand between her head and the audience.
Those Zip Cars looks sort of cool, though I don't quite see the advantage. Do they have a team of service people running around each city maintaining the cars? It sounds like a de-centralized "Rent-a-Car", but while they don't have to rent a main lot, they still must have to maintain a garage and offices somewhere, and I bet they have to pay for all the individual parking spaces. Seems gimmicky, but again, maybe I'm just not seeing the big picture. (After all, I still refuse to use a cell phone over my trusty land line, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing the point.)
-FL
You can see the peaks in demand happen every day from internal power dispatching stuff. Systemwide, if you look at PJM LMP prices, for that ISO at least, you can get a good handle on where the peaks occur..
I think really the big thing would not be so much a smart grid but one that can store electricity. If there was anything that humanity needed, it would be a better way to store and transport energy.
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