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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Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
Move over hax0rs (Score:5, Interesting)
The grid is smarter than you think (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I hate calling a bug a "feature", the fact is that blackouts are often a testament to fault-detection which could otherwise overload a grid and cause more substantial problems that would take longer to resolve.
When ever there is a power outage, a grid must be brought back up slowly. Otherwise, all the lights, motors, air-conditioners, fridges etc. switched on will overload the system and shut it down again - bunnyhopping.
Moreover, grids are deliberately designed (1950s or not) to channel energy where it's needed. This prevents overloading or underpowering.
It just saddens me how absolutely dependent we are on electricity/technology that in an emergency we cannot possibly do without it. How many people have been frustrated that their mail server is down, yet not realised they can WALK over to their colleague and TALK to him?
Powers out... Grab the shotgun!
Re:I remember when... (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't work quite like the internet but that's the concept power folks work with. The idea of bringing it up to tech isn't quite like the internet as we picture it but it has a lot of the same networked concepts.
Virusses/Virii anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Self destructive more like (Score:1, Interesting)
choosing it as a model for electricity distribution is'nt the most sane decision I've
heard of late.
Re:technology exists (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really about decentralizing the networks from where they are now but about new technology. I don't ever forsee any single person rerouting the power flow. No one person especially someone who doesn't work on the power grid has a clue how/where it needs to be routed. It about the adaptation and smarts of the system.
Decentralization is a widespread trend (Score:3, Interesting)
As power production technology gets less intrusive, it becomes more acceptable to have in a residential neighborhood, or hospital basement. Just as you get better quality of service from a web server down the hall than from one on another continent, a neighborhood fuel cell could provide more reliable power to the customer.
Decentralization is becoming a broad-ranging trend in our society. We have people telecommuting, there are microbreweries springing up all over, and people can make their own diesel fuel in their garages. It is not too difficult to come up with more examples (if you disagree, the same probably holds for counterexamples). On a more political note, this ongoing decentralization helps us reduce our dependence on 'The Man' and increases our self-determination. I, for one, welcome our -- never mind.
Local Generation (Score:5, Interesting)
However, decentralised systems can also faile - indeed, given perfect information at the centre (a big given, which often fails) a central overview can outperform a local intelligence. With a distributed system, you would probably get smaller but more frequent outages as local subsystems panic, with a larger total number of houshold outage minutes. This migh, of course, be less damaging if humans don't panic because it is only a few tens of blocks down.
The big potential gain, mentioned lower down in the article, is the potential structural changes to allow small scale generators to generate and distribute power locally. Lots of places have backup power generators, which cut in only when the mains fails. If the economics are right, it would be weorth while their running these continuosly, selling surplus power to the grid, and using the grid as a backup for their own power generation rather than the other way round. This saves the capital investment required for power stations, since it is using capital already invested instead of new capital - which may therefore overcome the diseconomies of small scale. It also saves the losses of long-distance power distribution. However, where you really win is that each area hasa a large proportion of its own power generated locally, so it doesn't care if the grid goes away. Suddently, it soean't matter what happens elswehere. there is also a cewrtain natural balance, as electricity is used in workplaces dirung the day, and when the workers go home the power is available for their domestic evening peak.
The real pie-in-the-sky payoff is when we all get hydrogen-powered cars, which generate electricity for no wear and tear on the fuel cell (we hope). If every car parked at home or work plugs into the grid, you have more generating capacity than you will need in the near future. (It is quoted that the power output of one year of US car sales exceeds the installed generating capacity of the entire world).
Re:England? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, whether it will stay that way with the lack of investment in England after electricity privatization, who can say.
Re:technology exists (Score:3, Interesting)
if more people would have invested in the clean energy and installed it correctly, this wouldn't be as big of a problem.
and if they bitch about money, ask them how much money they lose when the power goes out for a day or 2. I'm sure it'll easily pay for a 5kw PV system.
Re:technology exists (Score:3, Interesting)
Having sensors at remote locations that can use the power lines themselves to communicate with each other much like routers do over the larger Internet would seem to make this more feasible and not a toy [educationa...ld-toy.com].
Of course, broadband to your sensor might just encourage the crackers to attack them as noted in earlier posts...
Re:Security through antiquity (country specific) (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps its a country-by-country issue. In the U.S., power transmission is a neglected, regulated industry -- its the people that generate the power, not the people that transmit the power, that make all the money. Transmission, at least in the U.S., is a commodity infrastructure and many regard it as underfunded.
But even if the power companies of some countries could afford their own fiber, why would they choose this? And if they do pay to install fiber, why wouldn't they lease unused capacity on this line? To the extent that they either choose the cheaper option (use other's fiber) or lease out their own fiber, they are insecure. Public packets and infrastructure control packets should not be corouted.
For the love of humanity... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interference (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking into it now a little further, some of the American Relay Radio Leauge documents and links [arrl.org] has some mentions of problems for radio astronomy and a few other low-profile endeavors.
Anyway, I had no idea this was a possible outcome, and these claims make me think that perhaps it's better to insist that we really work on existing non-interfering technologies before we kill one of the few sections of spectrum that an individual can use on his own.
Re:Assumptions of grid design are becoming false (Score:3, Interesting)
C'mon. Mandatory utility control of HVAC systems? The implications boggle the mind.
From software bugs/malicious individuals killing all the air conditioning in NYC on the hottest day of the year to the Big Brother-type monitoring and control that definitely will not fly down here in the South, that's just not going to work.
The fact that there have not been problems like the NE outage on a regular basis tells a bit about the competence of those working the grid right now - sometimes, adding technology removes reliability, especially if the technology is not fully thought out.
Economist Shows its Slant (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, The Economist winds up the article with a startling and unjustified leap to the belief that a big-government socialist mega-project is the answer to all of our energy problems. And this in spite of the fact that all of the arguments in the article, especially those that compare the power grid to the internet, point to a smart network of small, local power suppliers as the promising, internet-inspired answer.
It SWINGS, baby! (Score:2, Interesting)
The anecdote I liked most was this:
- This European grid spans several thousand kilometers, from the Atlantic ocean to Poland at least
- This network can sometimes start to "swing" or oscillate, with Voltage/Amperage swinging back and forth accross the grid, with a period of several seconds
- As we all know (cough) when a system swings like this, with the end points fixed (like one end on the Atlantic and the other in Poland) the maximum amplitude is reached in the middle, lets say at a major cross-border link between France and Germany (yes its not half-way but stay with me)
- Assuming this cross-border link has the capacity to carry 1000 Googlewatts max, they can actually only use it to move 600 Googlewatts around, the other 400 GW have to be reserved to have room up the "swinging" of the whole grid.
- If you were to load this link up to full capacity, and the grid began to swing, it would blow the link up immediately.
- Try to explain this to a politician (or manager), who says "but the wire can take 1000 GW, why can we only transmit 600???"
He also mentioned that in many places, including the US, major grid interconnections are done in Direct Current (DC) to avoid exactly this kind of problem. Just imagine: Gigawatts of power being exchanged in DC - Edison would be proud, and Tesla must be spinning (or oscillating) in his grave
Buckminster Fuller had an answer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, he took his Dymaxion world map projection (one of the only map projection systems to lay out all of the continents on a flat surface with little to no distortion, showing all the continents in true size/proportion/distance to each other), and layed out the major grid interconnects for world power onto it. The idea being that if the world was using one single power system (heh, a logistic problem in itself, what with differing voltages and frequencies), that fluxuations in consumption and use would be smoothed out worldwide because when half the world was at peak, the other half would not be, thus allowing everyone the benefit of everyone's resources - basically a large power sharing network.
Of course, as one reads more about Bucky's ideas and theories, one quickly realizes that what he puts forth is a complete system for living in harmony with the Earth, its resources, and all of the people on the planet - you can't just take portions of his ideas and use them, ignoring the rest. To do so would be folly and would insure that what you were trying to do would eventually fail...