SMART THINKING: The nation needs to build thousands of miles of new transmission lines over the next 20 years to connect more renewable resources to electricity demand centers, experts say.
Image: US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
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The U.S. electrical grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses. The National Academy of Engineering ranks it as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. What it cannot do is support the massive shift to low-carbon power that scientists warn will be needed to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts.
To shrink the electricity sector's carbon footprint, experts say, the nation needs to build thousands of miles of new transmission lines over the next 20 years to connect more renewable resources to electricity demand centers. A 21st-century grid will also have to balance fluctuating power flows from wind and solar generation, small-scale distributed sources, and plug-in electric vehicles. And it must be interactive so that customers can manage their electricity use.
The transition is already under way, although it means different things for different companies. Firms that operate long-distance transmission lines, such as the Independent System Operators that manage regional grids in New York, New England and the Midwest, are adding sensors, phasors, and other devices invisible to non-engineers, that give them much more precise control over the system. Better control will help utilities add more renewable power, a challenge now because wind and solar energy are intermittent sources, and grid operators can't always react quickly when their output fluctuates.
"The whole power system is engineered to balance demand and supply at every second, which means that control over generators is really important," said energy consultant Peter Fox-Penner, a principal with The Brattle Group and author of Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities (Island Press, 2010). "But if you have really up-to-date information on all the flows on your grid, you can tolerate a little more variability. The smart grid will monitor everything at a very, very fine level of detail and reacts really fast, so operators will have time to fire up another plant if wind speed drops or a big cloud formation reduces solar output."
Suppliers such as utilities that deliver power directly to homes and businesses are focusing on a more visible element of the smart grid: meters. Today the grid transmits information one way - from utility to customer - and most meters only show power usage for the current billing period. What's more, power companies charge the same rate for every kilowatt-hour of electricity that's consumed, even though the cost of generating electricity can change dramatically during the day. Since users don't see how much power they are using or how much it costs in real time to generate it, they have little incentive to conserve energy or shift their use to off-peak hours.
To crack this problem retail power suppliers are installing advanced metering systems (smart meters and wireless communications systems and databases to support them). Advanced metering lets utilities show customers how much electricity they use at different times of day and how much that power costs. With regulators' approval, power companies can also use time-based pricing, charging customers based on the actual cost of power. There are many ways to structure time-based pricing: some suppliers charge more for certain blocks of time when demand is typically high, like weekday afternoons, while others raise prices sharply on selected days when the grid is under heavy stress, as on the hottest days of summer. But all of these programs aim to shift consumption away from high-demand periods.
Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. expects to reduce peak demand by 2014 by about 1,500 megawatts, or more than 20 percent of total peak load. "That's the equivalent of a new nuclear power plant, at a fraction of the cost of building new generation," said Mark Case, senior vice president for strategy and regulatory affairs for the utility, which is preparing to deploy two million smart meters and other energy management devices across its central Maryland territory over the next four years and initiate time-based pricing.
Last fall BGE received $200 million in stimulus funds from the Obama administration, part of $4.3 billion in national smart grid stimulus grants. The company expects to spend about $500 million in total on the program and projects that it will save BGE customers more than $2.6 billion.
The main reason for peak-shifting is economic, Fox-Penner said: It reduces the utility's cost to provide power at high-demand times. But peak-shifting can also reduce carbon emissions, although the climate impact depends on what kind of plants utilities would otherwise call into service to meet peak demand. BGE's peak reductions, for instance, will reduce the need to call on old and relatively dirty coal plants, eliminating significant carbon emissions, Case said.
The bigger climate payoff from smart metering comes as customers reduce electricity consumption throughout the year. Studies in the U.S., Canada and Australia have shown that providing real-time information about electricity use and costs can reduce energy use, although some customers are more receptive than others to smart metering and time-based pricing.
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8 Comments
Add CommentCheap high capacity batteries will make the need for a smart grid much less, and mean that power prices will not fluctuate anything like as much as anticipated
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisin Australia, smart meters have recently become unpopular because the initial pricing to pay more during peak daytime hours has been found to unfairly cost the elderly or invalid stay-at-home much more, maybe doubling their bills rendering them unaffordable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe cost of the new smart meter conversion at about $1K a pop would buy enough mass produced nuclear power to supply the average households needs forever.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience shows we may be less than ten years from a civilization ending Global warming/Peak Oil/ Ocean acidification crisis that only a mass conversion to nuclear power can save us from and we are wasting time and treasure on this?
Leaving the elderly and disabled to die in obscurity is a time-honoured practice in the rich world, but shhhh let's not think about that...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr about the total cost of ownership of nukes, or the cost of a nukatastrophe.
Anyway.. I'm surprised the article fails to mention the impact direct current high voltage transmission will have on electricity supply and flexibility. Perhaps the US will wake up to this 10 years after Europe, North Africa, China and India. Perhaps the US national debt will have been called in and there will be no Superpower US left to afford any waking up.
No skin off my nose - I'm in Europe - but a deskinned US will be ugly.
Has anyone heard of algae? You can grow a plant-like microorganism, feed it CO2 and water, expose it to sunlight, extract its fats/oils, send it to an oil refinery, and burn it just like fossil fuels. Carbon neutral, mass producible, and as green as it gets; I believe algae could wean human dependance on fossil fuels forever.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmart Grids is really an interesting concept. The concepts of advanced metering, time-of-day based pricing and keeping the subscriber informed of usage is definitely something that can be adopted by Telcos which are facing severe pressures due to flat-rate pricing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSciDocWannaBe : Algae biotechnologie is still a long way off. But today we can already pyrolyse algae to produce carbon neutral biofuels, biogas, hydrogen, biochar or biofertilisers. Algae can be harvested from the sargasso sea without needing farming techniques. And not only algae but any biomass can be used as feedstock, meaning no need to use edible crops. This technology is now in production and is economical for private investors. See www.eprida.com to see the results of a donation-funded research group which has developed biomass pyrolysis over the past ten years. So over ten years biomass pyrolysis will absorb vast quantities of CO2 from the air, mitigating climate change via a constellation of 5,000,000 retorts throughout the world producing biofuels locally from local sustainable biomass supplies maintaining biodiversity through intermittent partial harvesting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the discussions about this subject , I like to point
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisout that France has 80% of the electricity generated by Nuclear Energy.
The people of France do not glow in the dark or have 3 eyes etc, and few if any have any safety concerns.
They have a well prepared set up to handle leaks,emissions etc.
America seems to have an irrational fear of Nuclear Energy, while much of the world is building Nuclear Plants which will not kill thousands as in coal mining and associated emissions from coal buring power stations.