Building the Energy Internet 197
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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Building the Energy Internet
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article text, in case you are correct (Score:2, Informative)
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
ARRL concerned over rf interference (Score:4, Informative)
An article regarding their concern is here [arrl.org].
It's called PHM and it's new (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Sensors - 30 times a second? wow (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:England? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [bbc.co.uk] for power generation have also been raised.
Just search the BBC [bbc.co.uk] 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)
real electric grid problems (Score:1, Informative)
No amount of hardware fixes will overcome sheer greedism as a business model, with government oversight being the foxes guarding the hen house.
zogger
valid concern (Score:1, Informative)
I won't believe til I see it.. and it works 100% (Score:3, Informative)
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
Assumptions of grid design are becoming false (Score:5, Informative)
Cutting off customers is a poor substitute for demand-side management [doe.gov]. 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.Vehicular generation (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Videos of interference (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/#Video [arrl.org]
Re:I remember when... (Score:3, Informative)
The entire system was designed around the notion that each node would have a signifigant surplus of available power, and would thus be able to "take over" for a faulty neighbor-node. Since the power companies, in an effort to maximize profit, simply used the existing surplus power to feed increased demand, instead of upgrading and/or adding new nodes (an expensive process, I'm sure), the system doesn't work as well as it should. That's how that debacle in NYC last year happened, IIRC.
Re:Security through antiquity (Score:3, Informative)
Dumb article (Score:4, Informative)
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.