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White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid
FizzaNawaz writes "On Monday, the Obama administration is preparing announce the next steps that the US will take to build its 21st century electric grid, and IT is expected to play a big part in the plans. The White House is hosting a 90-minute media event called 'Building the 21st Century Electric Grid' and is releasing a new report on what it will take for lawmakers and the private sector to come together to solve this aspect of the energy challenge."
Is there anything the government can't keep it's paws out of?
Gundam?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
... And actually put some thought and investment into a secure infrastructure, this time? The existing implementations are horribly reliant on auxilliary security controls, such as firewalls, to protect systems that rely on plaintext passwords and access controls to protect them from buffer overflows and other rudimentary vulnerabilities. These systems, and the NERC CIPS policies that act as a paper armor against scrutiny, present a real danger to our infrastructure, and pouring more money into procurement is really going to make things worse.
Will Siemens have anything to do with the 21st century electric grid?
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Private companies are going to pay for multi billion dollar infrastructure without anti competitive exclusive usage of it?
What is the point you are trying to make?
Yeah, God forbid our country actually do something with its wealth. We should all just sit around on our asses, living off the work of our grandfathers, while complaining that nothing ever gets done.
We decided to leave high-speed internet deployment to the private sector. How's that working out? Oh, look, $50 a month for speeds that would make Europeans laugh, and the ISPs are already looking into bandwidth caps on top because they don't want to bear the expense of laying more fiber.
We've not had wealth since the Clinton administration. Now we have debt. That being said, infrastructure is something worth borrowing money to improve. Doing so will lower long term costs and create jobs.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Right, I have to ask this as a (more than likely) ignorant European who probably just doesn't "get" it - but what's with the obsession with "commies"? Who exactly are you referring to? I know that "Back in the day" of the cold war when Russia was seen as the big mortal enemy of the US, most people referred to them simply as the commies, or "communist Russia", but it has been like 2 decades since the USSR fell, who's left? Is it China? Is that who the "commies" are? If so, what has China got to do with the Obama administration?
I genuinely do not know - why are Americans obsessed with communism? Why is it that, for example, a national health service is a bit "communist"? And why does that inherently make it bad? I'm not saying +1 for communism, more along the lines of "Even if it is a tad communist, how can free health care for all actually be a bad thing?". In the same way that Hitler was supposedly a vegetarian (I know he actually wasn't and it's just a myth, but anyway), why does that mean that being a vegetarian is a bad thing? Charles Darwin was supposedly a womanising prick, but that doesn't mean his theory on Natural Selection is any less valid. Not that I think that a free health service IS communist or anything, but I digress.
Anyway, the sum total of what I'm asking is basically -
* Who are the "commies"?
* Why do people care about the "commies"?
* Are people afraid of the "commies" for some reason? Are they thinking that if a new electric grid is built, suddenly Russia will revert back to the USSR or something?
* Is Slashdot communist?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I had read that there's actually at lot of capacity that just goes to waste over night. If most EVs charged over night, it wouldn't be much of a burden on the grid as a whole (though local transformers might need upgrading). At least not for a while. I mean, it would be a while before most peopel ha gone electric.
So your point is to do nothing... got yah.
Just a side note.... its a rant if you just complain... its an opinion when you lay out the facts... and its a wise man who offers a solution.
No no... the Clinton era was actually reducing our debt.
We have plenty of wealth. This idea that we're broke is a right-wing lie to excuse robbing the poor and giving to the rich. If we repeal the Bush tax cuts and cut our military down to a reasonable size (say... not bigger than every other county in the world put together), we'll be back in the black in no time. Instead, we get demands to end Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and Food Stamps, and use that money to give a record-breakingly large tax cut to the top 2%.
Lots of generated power goes to waste. Our current grid is effectively "dumping massive amounts of power into a hole." The smart grid helps to reduce that waste.
If you have to ask, you don't get it.
Congratulations, you have successfully demonstrated that you understand what a "question" is.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian.
On the left side of the political spectrum you have socialists. If you go even further left you have communists. It isn't necessarily that there are "commies", but using the term is a way of deriding certain ways of doing things. Having the government use tax dollars (or in the US case, borrowed dollars) to improve the power grid something might be seen as the left-wing way of doing so; whereas providing tax incentives to private corporations to do the work might be an example of a right-wing way of acheiving the same goal. While the Obama admistration aren't "commies" by most people's definitions, they could easily be classified as socialists.
What I'd like to know is how the US government plans to pay for new programs like this? Their economy is slowly imploding and they're being crushed by unprecidented debt, yet they're worried about building an IT-Powered Smart Grid??
Infrastructure investments like this are long term. The private sector has trouble thinking past the next quarterly report. The OP might not have meant that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government but I'll say it.
Time and time again the private sector has shown that they will only do the bare minimum required to wring every dollar out of the general public with the least amount of effort and if it requires lying through their teeth then so be it.
Need an example? How about the global economic crisis we're currently digging ourselves out of. By the way, the scum sucking leaches in the private sector that caused this meltdown seem to be the first ones that recovered. Funny that? Personally I think these parasites should be buried under so much regulation and bureaucracy that they'd never see the light of day.
So yeah, the private sector can't be trusted to do the right thing unless it's at the end of a very big government stick.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
So is this an admission you don't know what you're going on about either?
In US politics only old people participate[1] since voting isn't mandatory and young people are stupid and lazy[2]. You have to remember that the soviet union collapsed in 1991 and a grand total of 2 years of voters have lived since then. 1 year if you count the last major election (2010). Even if you exclude youngsters you still only have 10 of about 60 years of voters who don't remember the soviet union being around. It's going to be a while before the average citizen didn't have their political paranoias formed after Communism stopped being a threat.
[1] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/todays_median_age_voters_grew.html
[2] Sad but true.
It was Carter who put them up, and Reagan who took them down.
if you want to reduce the need for power plants, you're talking about reducing demand, and the only way to do that through the grid is to turn people's stuff off whether they like it or not.
That would only increase demand. One way to reduce demand for power, and it works well for anything but is not popular, is to tax the living hell out of energy usage that goes beyond some acceptable and reasonable daily allotment. This way energy hogs would subsidize the energy cost for those that conserve.
The Admin and the Engineer
You're on an internet that was invented with government money. Get off now.
You're right - we should leave networking the grid into efficiency among its many monopolies all to Enron. A private corp will do it right. And quickly, too - none of this waiting around for the government to get around to taking the risks no one else has. Enron will never abuse the market it hosts. It will spend its profits reinvesting in innovation and efficiencies. Keep your government paws off my Enron!
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make install -not war
Based on everything I have read about a "smart grid", this is about making sure that everyone has an electric meter that lets the power company (and through them the government) track exactly when and how much electricity they use. "Dear Mr. Doe, we see that you have set your air conditioner to 72 degrees. Don't you think it would be more responsible to set it at 74 degrees."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I couldn't find one provable assertion in that entire post - the gov't collects about $2.6T/year and spends about $4.3T/year, a $1.7T deficit each year (excluding the exceptional TARP, Stimulus, and other one-off spending events). The Bush Tax Cuts "cost" $470BN/year ($400BN/year for the "middle-class tax cuts" everyone was so keen on maintaining, and $70BN/year for the top 1-2% that we simply couldn't afford), and last year our entire military expenditures came to about $660BN/year, for all operations, including our "overseas contingency exercises" - that leaves you about $500BN/year short of being "in the black"...
Medicare & Social Security will implode in a few years, something needs to be done - your acceptance of the lie that Republicans want to "end" medicare is exactly why the Democrats have taken their "Thelma & Lousie" approach to simply over-promise benefits and gun it for the cliff...
MSNBC will be glad to know you're reflexively parroting their talking points without question.
Ken
We decided to leave high-speed internet deployment to the private sector. How's that working out? Oh, look, $50 a month for speeds that would make Europeans laugh, and the ISPs are already looking into bandwidth caps on top because they don't want to bear the expense of laying more fiber.
The government handing out monopolies is not 'the private sector'. It's actually those companies becoming part of the government. If prices are high and profits are high then you should wonder why competition isn't rushing in to take a cut of the profits. It's because they aren't allowed to.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Apart from many ways already to store energy generated during low demand at more efficient plants, there's all kinds of ways to conserve electricity with no noticeable decrease in work done by it. In fact the "smart" techniques tend to upgrade the electrical system for better control that improves the value of the work done by it, even as it conserves waste. And then there's the really smart techniques that "turn people's stuff off" only when they want (or don't care about) it.
Just because you don't have the imagination (or research, or hipness to daily news) to realize that smart grids improve the electrical value to its users precisely as it's cutting its consumption, doesn't mean it's not already available. Find out what's beyond your own ability to do yourself before you earn the privilege of dispensing sarcasm about it.
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make install -not war
The Ryan plan eliminates Medicare as we know it. Yes, some older people will be grandfathered in. And yes, it replaces it with a new system with the same name. But those don't change the fact that the system we know as Medicare would end under his proposal.
Furthermore, the official estimates are that his plan would only cover a small portion of health care costs, which means most seniors would be simply unable to afford care, which means they bankrupt their children and die miserable with guilt (or hide their illnesses and die in pain). And the figures Ryan uses to create his estimates are laughably optimistic, calling for the US to enter a sustained period of growth the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the Industrial Revolution.
When Bill McKibben brought back Carter's solar roof panels (that had been stored in Maine since Reagan took them down), Obama promised to put them back up.
That was last year. Obama's got a week and a half before he misses the deadline announced by Energy Secretary Chu back in October 2010, June 21st.
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make install -not war
Andrew Jackson is the only President to pay off the national debt. Presindent Clinton, with the "help" of the Republicans in Congress was able to restrain spending and get government spending in-line with revenues, leading to a token annual surplus his last year in office, with PROJECTED surpluses if nothing changed from the year 2000 to 2010... Unfortunately, things changed since Clinton left office.
Clinton reduced the annual deficit, yet did not reduce the national debt while he was in office He took office with $4.6T in debt and left office leaving about $5.6T in debt. [source]
Debt is what we accumulate, year after year. Deficit is the new debt we rack-up each year, that gets added to the debt. Debt Deficit
Ken
Commies, or Communists, come in many dastardly forms. They include:
1. Pinko.
2. Bolshevik.
3. Russian.
4. Chinese.
5. Cuban.
6. Canadian.
7. European.
8. Anyone of differing opinion.
God help us if anyone of the above manage to infiltrate the US and spread their Communist creed.
Sony.
This is pretty much it. The number I heard is that only for about 100 hours every year is the grid at capacity.(In the summer from from what I remember. Lot of people using their AC's.) The entire rest of the time there's a surplus of power. Of course one thing that doesn't get mentioned is that the new meters necessary for the smart grid are quite accurate. (People get kind of pissed when their bill goes up because their old meter under measured their energy usage.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Yeah because huge bloated defense programs, building weapons we don't need, really has a huge effect on counter-terrorism here at home. Meanwhile Bush was in office for 9 months, and his people were dismissing Richard Clark for "running around with his hair on fire" concerning Al Quaeda.
as former manager of the engineering/design group of a power switching systems company, I know a bit about smart grids. But how in the U.S. are we going to get away from the evil of the U.S. government and the mega-corporations that have it in its pocket? A smart grid in *those* hands becomes a tools of yet more artificial scarcity creation, more throttling/restrictions/capping, and a "kill switch" for the government. Instead of bringing online the cheap abundant energy of this earth, we'll be rationing the fossil fuels for another century. The first priority isn't a "smart grid", it's alternative energy (and integrating that into the "dumb grid" by decades old means works well enough). This "smart grid" and all this wailing about conserving is at this point in time a distraction from the core issue, that there is no shortage of energy on planet earth. A health growing civilization uses energy; we should be *increasing* our use of energy, not decreasing it.
Not entirely true. Dubya put solar panels on the White House's garden shed:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/hey-george-w-bush-put-solar-panels-on-the-white-house-too/64151/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Of course, after you look at your W-4 and pay stub, you might also look at the Federal budget, and notice that all that money that is "provisioned separately" is then thrown into one big pile.
And then they spend the big pile.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
First of all, Clinton's defense cuts were hardly "huge." The military budget was what was huge.
Secondly, if you think more defense spending would have prevented 9/11, I'd like to know what planet you're from because it's not earth.
Clinton, for his faults, actually was pretty proactive in trying to fight terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular. Only one thing would have prevented 9/11, and that's better intelligence and communication between agencies.
Bush bumped up the military spending and it did nothing to reduce terrorism - which actually increased on his watch.
The biggest domestic terrorist attack in the Clinton years was the Oklahoma City. Do you think more military spending would have prevented that?
It's not entirely the fault of the private sector. Shareholders - people who have money to invest but flat-out don't understand business - are just as much of (if not bigger) part of the problem.
An example. Let's say you own a t-shirt printing company that pulls in $200,000 a year. You have no debt whatsoever. Your printing machine is outdated and starting to run down, so you decide to buy a new one - but it will show an overall loss on the quarterly report. Sure, you'd probably end up making back its cost over time, but that quarterly loss is a nigh-unforgivable sin in the corporate world. Instead, a loan is taken out - effectively cooking the books - so you're not shown to post a loss.
It's shit like this that is the one of the huge reasons we as a country are in as much trouble as we are. Nobody can think for the long-term anymore.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I'm always amazed that people think Clinton reduced the debt. He was reducing the deficit, not the debt. Debt continued to pile up under Clinton, just not quite as fast.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm
The last time the debt went down was around 1951.
Well, you can't do much about the debt if you don't have any money left over at the end of each year to pay towards the loans, right? So, lowering the deficit was an effort headed in the right direction anyway. Clinton left us with a surplus. Which Bush immediately turned around and gave back to his rich friends (err, I mean "The American People").
This is Washington in a nutshell: Democrats: Tax & Spend. Republicans: Borrow & Spend. At least the Dems are willing to withstand the public's dislike of more taxation. The Reps are a bunch of cowards who have become quite adept at robbing our grandchildren of their opportunity to live in a country where they would otherwise have been able to participate in the "American Dream."
I haven't been this anguished about our country's future since the 1970's (price freezes, gasoline rationing...). But, Americans have been scared by (the "threat" of more) terrorism. Land of the free home of the brave my ass.
You cowards will get what you deserve in the end. And, it ain't gonna be pretty. If you'll put up with full-body scanners in airports, they know you'll put up with just about anything if they can keep you scared. Wars and rumors of wars (1984 should be required reading in every high school civics class).
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
The main cause of our economic problems is the recession.
Thanks, Captain Obvious! I didn't know that recessions caused economic problems.
As the economy improves, federal income will improve with it.
We've been running deficits since the 1950s. At no point in the last 60 years has our government been able to spend less than what they take in. Good economies, great economies, high taxes, low taxes, Republicans, Democrats... it hasn't mattered. At some point, you have to acknowledge the real source of the problem... out of control spending.
I know Fox has poisoned you. They tell you we're broke.
I don't watch cable news at all.
These two statements you made should be more than enough to prove that you are completely full of shit.
I think many are missing the point here, and their ignorance is astounding. We will never have zero debt. There will never be, nor should there, an effort to pay the debt off completely, as having zero debt is dangerous for our government/country. Our founding fathers were smart enough to plan things this way. If our country owes people, businesses, and other countries money, then those creditors have a vested interest in the continued success, and survival, of our country. The whole point is for our country to have debt. Now the discussion to be had, among those with this basic understanding, is how much debt we should have; mainly as a percentage in relation to our GDP.
I am really tempted to leave my post like this, and let people come out of the woodwork telling me how wrong/crazy I am, but I suppose I need to give full disclosure as I cannot take credit for this idea; it belongs to Alexander Hamilton. I think he had something to do with the creation of our treasury, or something like that....
Member of American Sarcasm Society - Motto: "Like we need your help!"
if you design a system that can be described as 'you can gamble with someone else's money all you want - if you win, it's all yours, if you lose, we got you covered' you seriously blame people who exploited the system? It was an obvious and perfectly rational thing to do. When there is no fear of loss, riskier behavior is unavoidable as there are only 2 options left on the table: a win and a fucking big win. It's universal, that's how people behave - be it sandbox, casino, stock market.
When the building that collapses, architects and engineers responsible for shoddy work have their asses dragged to court, while lawmakers producing crap legislation that brings whole nations to the knees walk free.
Letting banks fail was a right thing to do - it would be painful but it would instill fear in the hearts of banksters. Bailouts made them feel like gods who have the whole world by the balls and now they take the full advantage of the fact
Infrastructure investments like this are long term. The private sector has trouble thinking past the next quarterly report. The OP might not have meant that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government but I'll say it.
As opposed to the government, which built tens of thousands of bridges, roads, levees, dams, etc over the last century and then utterly failed to maintain them, diverting the tax money generated specifically for that maintenance to other projects, leaving us with crumbling infrastructure that will cost trillions of dollars to repair? That's to say nothing of the even larger miscalculations in the cost estimates of various entitlement programs prior to their enactment and the subsequent decision to drain them to cover other government debts since their creation...
Or, take my old high school... a local wealthy businesman donated a new field house and a bunch of amenities to the football team. That "free" gift costs as much as two teachers a year just to maintain and because the other sports teams were "neglected" by the donation, the parents of those players insisted the school spend additional millions renovating the other fields likewise, again, costing the salary of a few teachers to maintain all of them, use lights for night games, etc. The school district got a major budget cut from the state this year and opted to close a school and cut several more teachers to make up the shortfall. Such a wise investment that government made, always looking at the long term and never considering the short term costs, much less the long term effects of those costs... but, hey, several administrators got their names on buildings they created with our money, ultimately resulting in tax funded monuments to themselves at the cost of a pesky dozen or so teachers just this year...
Government is just as fallible as private enterprise... the fact that every government eventually topples should be evidence of that, yet for some reason, statists always believe that government is visionary, omniscient and has all the right answers.
BTW - those scum sucking leaches that caused the meltdown and quickly recovered... how did they do it? Oh yeah, by the government taking from you and generations yet to come and giving it to them. Your precious government is no more noble than they are.
Stop Koolaid Politics
Anyone who can produce more electricity than they need should be able to easily sell it. It makes no sense at all to allow utility companies to put barriers in the way of this happening or for them to not pay a fair price for the power. The smart grid should abide by basic common sense.
The Democratic party plan, also, eliminates Medicare as we know it, so what is your point. Leaving Medicare as we know it is not one of the options on the table.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Is that the IT-Powered Smart Grid is ACTUALLY powered by out of work IT professionals. A large hamster wheel has been constructed towards this end.
we should be *increasing* our use of energy, not decreasing it.
That argument only makes sense if technology remains constant. I remember the energy crisis of the 1970s. This was before computers and micro-controllers were common. It was still quite common in industrial plants to control liquid flows in industrial plants by using a valve to constrict flow from a dumb pump. That meant energy consumption went up the *less* liquid that was moved. Nobody would do it that way now. You'd use a computer controlled pump.
In 1958, a 21" RCA color TV would have nearly 30 vacuum tubes. Heating the tube filaments and driving the CRT resulted in a power draw 380 watts. A modern 32" (we're talking about progress here) LCD TV can draw as little as 75 watts; that's more than twice the viewing area for 1/5 the energy. The energy consumed watching the 1958 TV for one hour would power an iPad for 150 hours. 380 watt hours should be good for at least 40-50 hours of movie watching on a modern tablet.
A 190 hp 1959 Corvette does 0-60 in 6.9 seconds and guzzles 10 miles/gallon. Fifty years later one of it's descendants does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds and gets 14-20 MPG. For that matter, a Honda Accord EX sedan will do 0-60 in 0.8 seconds faster than the '59 'vette and go nearly three times as far on a gallon of gas.
The lesson is that advancing civilization doesn't get more utility by consuming more energy; if anything it's marked by *less* energy consumed to generate a unit of utility.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.