The Smart Grid and the Fossil Economy

My story, A Time Away, posted today, describes a student’s struggle to break out of constraints imposed by his own thinking and by social structures in the not-too-distant future.  He rips himself away, physically, and undertakes a journey across America and Europe to visit a place where he might find fundamental truths on which he can ground new perspectives.  I hope you enjoy the story – just click on the title under Stories on the home page. I want to focus in this post on just one of the things our hero encounters as he sets out on his quest.  It’s not a major plot event in the story but is symptomatic of the economic conditions he finds in his late twenty-first century travels. 

As he travels by train across America (the cost of airfare late in this century being prohibitive for ordinary mortals), the narrator briefly describes the rail transport system that carries him and most goods and passengers.  It’s much expanded and improved from today’s rail system and although it functions well, is crowded.  It’s powered not by fossil fuels but by electricity produced by a smart grid connecting distributed power sources along the route, and shares that power with local communities it passes through.  This is an optimistic story. It briefly alludes though to a painful process of down-building from a transportation and power-grid system that flagrantly wasted energy to this more efficient and intelligent system.  It mentions local catastrophes, deliberate sabotage, and even several local pitched battles.  Why the resistance to such a reasonable outcome?

Let’s start with the smart grid concept, and why we don’t have one today.  The North American power grid is a marvel of reliability, meeting its load requirements 99.97%¹ of the time.  But it is not a model of sophistication in the information technology that could be used to optimize its efficiency.  Compare it to communications technology, in particular the internet, in which all the machines spread over the world are communicating with each other, all the time.  Electrical power networks aren’t like that, at least not yet. (And given the security concerns, they should never be quite like our hackable internet.) 

“Smart grid” is a phrase that has been thrown around a lot.  But it means different things to different people in different contexts.  To some financial analysts, it’s a system that can optimize how a given amount of generated power can be optimally sold to customers based on real-time pricing.² To electrical engineers, it’s a system that can provide real-time feedback to adjust the frequency or power draw of customers’ machines and appliances and also provide reactive power to sync with generators on the grid.³  To some, it’s just having the ability to automatically schedule some appliances for times other than peak power draw times on the grid, based on real time feedback.  And there are others. The U.S. federal government has tried to reconcile the various potentials attributed to a smart grid and produced a truly bureaucratic description of an elephant by a group of blind men, listing the attributes of a smart grid but with no functional concept of a system that produces all those attributes.⁴  So the first reason we don’t have a smart grid today is that we don’t have a clear common understanding of what it is in the first place.  There are many research projects you can read about on the web about individual cogs, wheels, smart-meters, inverters, trunks, tails, ears, feet and other smart things on the grid.  What I don’t see are any clearly and simply enunciated visions of what the smart grid as a whole will be, how it will work. 

Something like: “An automated communications and control system for the power grid, linking distributed and varying generating resources to user loads, with real-time communication between sources and loads used to optimize efficiency and economy, having the inherent flexibility to add new power sources over a wide range of sizes and locations, and designed to facilitate a transition from the central power station – transmission/distribution architecture to an integrated distributed grid using primarily renewable power sources.”  I’m certain there could be a better-articulated vision. But what I see being discussed now are lists of smart things that could be added on to the existing power grid, rather than the transformative vision that is needed.    

In my story of the not-so-far future, small, distributed generation sources dominate over big, centralized fossil-fueled plants because a cascade of events has made the economic, environmental and ultimately moral bankruptcy of sucking the earth dry of fossil fuels no longer deniable. Renewable solar and wind, and other local small generation resources (biomass, biogas, low-head hydro, tidal energy, geothermal, stored energy and others, some yet to be developed) constitute the bulk of generation resources after fossil fuel prices go non-linear.  We don’t go nuclear.  Germany and Japan recently committed to denuclearize because of the risks, but also because nuclear fission doesn’t pencil out economically or environmentally compared to renewables and investing in efficiency technology, as has been clear for decades.⁵  We learn to live more comfortably with more renewable and less overall energy.  The sources are distributed and in general closer to the users, reducing power losses in cables and wires.⁶  Because of the inherent variability of renewable resources and for increasing efficiency, flexibility is the overarching characteristic and goal of the design of such a system.  The brittle paradigm of a huge central power station pumping out power to a massive transmission system feeding smaller distribution networks breaks down with the varying and distributed nature of renewable power sources.  In my hypothetical late 21^st century soft landing, we transition to a distributed system where generators are connected and disconnected as needs come and go, as better technologies emerge, as people move and change how they do things. Through the likely economic decline, we use information technology more rather than less.    

So how do you design a big, distributed network where things are always changing?  Let’s go back to the internet comparison again. It’s been said that the internet is a set of protocols rather than a system of hardware.⁷  Its fundamental reality is a set of rules, or protocols, for how data is handled, shared and accepted by all users, rather than a specific set of cables and machines. Just as your body isn’t the set of atoms, molecules and tissues that compose it today; they are regularly replaced but your body goes on. Users who want to connect and thus become a part of the internet must accept its protocols and build and operate their hardware to function with the protocols.  And the result is, well, like magic, isn’t it?  For the internet, the protocols apply to a packet-switched traffic of data that moves among the hardware devices.  This would not be the case for a power grid.  (Although it would include a parallel data system that might use internet protocols, modified as needed for enhanced security.)  Nevertheless, the system could be designed to automatically adapt as new users and resources are brought online as long as those resources follow the protocols, and reject the new units if they fail the protocols.  It could be done. And I wonder if a protocol-based automated grid is the essence of the smart grid of the future.⁸  The grid already relies on hardware standards for equipment connected to it.  Extending this to functional protocols that disconnect if not followed is just another step.

Sounds very rosy.  Then why the pitched battles?  There will be big users and small users, good users and bad users.  They will have conflicting interests in how the system is set up, how the protocols are written. Today we have a controversy over net neutrality, which is primarily a big vs small issue.  The stakes with power systems will be greater, and thus the potential for conflicts more severe.  In some places there will be natural large, cheap centralized power resources still viable, such as hydropower and local fossil fuel deposits that are economically extractable.  The people local to these resources may feel they have a natural right to them, and be unwilling to share on a grid. Others may simply be greedy and deceptive, just maybe.  There’s been overwhelming deception with regard to energy, the more so as we approach the limits of sustainability.  It won’t go away, but I prefer to imagine a future after the decline of the fossil economy in which we learn something from past mistakes.  Sometimes we do. And, of course, the conflicting interests in what a smart grid might be good for are why there is no common vision for what the smart grid will be.  But there is no good reason for the utter lack of vigorous debate.   

So if the finally “realized losses” (as financial folks say) of fossil fuel depletion trigger a cascading economic slump that never quite recovers, as sketched briefly in my story, how can this battered economy afford a fancy new automation system like a smart grid for its power and transportation systems?  Because it may be essential, given the basic differences between renewable sources and big centralized fossil and nuclear fission sources.  Advances in information technology we have today that could only have been developed in a world of cheap and flagrant energy use won’t just disappear as the fossil economy goes through its death spiral of busts and temporary booms followed by worse busts.⁹  And the micro-computer and communications technologies can be re-purposed.  There will be lots of surplus hardware on the market, that already has been created using processes that are no longer affordable.  Ingenuity will be required to reconfigure those materials into systems that can make the best use of renewable energy sources to provide the services needed, such as transportation, at lower energy costs.  Ingenuity is a priceless commodity, but it’s not in short supply.  Not around here. 

Fossil fuels are unsustainable, in the long run. They will be depleted.  That’s a simple, undeniable truth.  Nuclear fission is impractical as a source of large-scale power, in the long run.  In the long run, renewables are the only sources of power we’ll have, coupled with efficiency (doing more with less).  To make a renewables-dominated power grid work, something like a smart grid will be necessary.  It will require not just adding telecommunications, bells, and whistles to the existing power grid.  It will require a transformation of the power grid.  Planning to establish renewables as our dominant power source, for all types of energy use, should not wait until we are surprised about the sudden problems with the fossil fuel pipeline that no one saw coming. 

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[1] EPRI (2014), The Integrated Grid - REALIZING THE FULL VALUE OF CENTRAL AND DISTRIBUTED ENERGY RESOURCES, p. 9

[2] Mokhtari, Melissa, A New Approach to Decentralized Energy, in Blockchain at Berkeley:  https://blockchainatberkeley.blog/a-new-approach-to-decentralized-energy-5ab2b5460fa0

[3] EPRI (2015), THE INTEGRATED GRID - A Benefit-Cost Framework, Chapters 4 through 8 [link]

[4] The U.S. Congress has cast the defining characteristics of a smart grid into federal law.  See Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007: https://www.energy.gov/oe/downloads/title-xiii-smart-grid-sec-1301-1308-statement-policy-modernization-electricity-grid

[5] See Lovins, Amory, Forget Nuclear, in Rocky Mountain Institute, vol. xxiv, #1, Spring 2008.

[6] EPRI(2014), The Integrated Grid -REALIZING THE FULL VALUE OF CENTRAL AND DISTRIBUTED ENERGY RESOURCES, p. 21

[7] See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/the-essence-of-the-net/

[8] See https://www.nist.gov/el/smartgrid/building-energy-internet-internet-protocols-smart-grid. Note that the draft protocols developed by NIST are only for the data systems of a smart grid.  They are not protocols for the functioning of the power generation equipment itself.   

[9] See Greer, J.M., The Long Descent for one well-informed scenario of how the industrial economy may decline in a sawtooth pattern with depletion of fossil fuels, exacerbated by the particularly sensitive attributes of liquid petroleum.  Elasticity of demand for energy will not work over the long run because energy is not an ordinary commodity.  Energy cannot be substituted, and fuels that themselves require increasing amounts of energy will inevitably inflate prices in a non-elastic way.  Furthermore, energy is baked into every single commodity, unlike every other commodity except human labor.  So as the aggregate costs of energy increase, the prices of all products in the economy eventually increase, albeit with time lags.  And those that manage to use less energy, for example with the help of a smart grid, will gain advantages. Greer asserts (p. 86) that a continent-wide power grid will disintegrate, with individual cities having their own island grids supplying modest amounts of power to local elites.  I think other scenarios are possible. 

Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

Welcome to my new blog.  About once a month, I'll be posting commentary, speculations, criticisms, remarks, and brief book reviews about science fiction and related things.  I'll be posting my own science fiction stories, less often, under the "Stories" heading on the home page.  Please comment!

In my science fiction story, In Defense of Biohumans, posted today, I speculate about a powerful, fully conscious artificial intelligence (AI) and how it might be absorbed into society, or vice versa.  I don’t want to tell you too much.  I hope you will read and enjoy the story.  It’s on its own page under Stories on my home page.  Just click. 
 

There’s been a lot of scare language lately about the dangers of AI.  Some of the worst is about AI getting out of control and wreaking terror and devastation either through a colossal mistake or through conscious intention to advance its own program.  Can an AI ever become conscious?  Philosophers western and eastern have clenched their brains for centuries over the question of whether our consciousness (or mind) arises from matter or is a special something else.¹ They’ve yet to resolve the question. This question could, of course, be of critical importance in deciding whether a machine can become conscious.
 

One approach to this question that could be aided by scientific tools is to trace how the functions of our own conscious minds may have developed naturally from physical and chemical processes that produced life on earth, and then compare the features produced by such a development to the peculiarities of our own consciousness as a test of plausibility.  This is the approach taken in a recent book by anthropologist and biologist Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature – How Mind Emerged from Matter (W.W. Norton 2012) which provides a remarkable discussion of how consciousness may have emerged step-by-step from known physical processes.  Deacon shows how biochemical processes in ancient earth conditions could have driven early life forms to evolve consciousness.  He doesn’t conclude that he’s proven the case, but rather that the mechanisms he unfolds could form the basis of a program to investigate and prove or disprove hypotheses for how our consciousness emerged from matter.  This program, if carried out, could go beyond the basic question of “Could it happen?” and help in developing AI, since the more we understand about human or animal consciousness, the features that make it peculiarly human among other things, the more we can understand about how a machine consciousness might occur.  And how it might be different from the human variety.
   

Although Deacon doesn’t discuss AI in his book, his arguments lend credence to the idea that consciousness can emerge from known physics and chemistry. He sets forth a very orderly exposition of ideas and facts that lead to plausible hypotheses regarding how consciousness emerges from the physical and chemical processes of biology.  It’s a big book, 545 pages plus a glossary, notes and references. It’s enjoyable reading though, because he takes care to provide the necessary information in clear prose so that an attentive reader not familiar with the underlying science can follow it. 

Taking a completely fresh approach to the worn discussion about the nature of consciousness, Deacon invents several important new terms to explain his ideas, beginning with “absential,” which he describes as the “elusive character” of many things associated with life that depend on what is not there, such as appetite, aspiration, desire, and more general functions such as references, purposes and values.  He says this absential quality is “a defining property of life and mind.”  Later he introduces “ententional” phenomena, which “have an orientation to a specific constitutive absence, a particular and precise something that is their critical defining attribute.”  This is distinguished as a more general form of and precedent to “intentional” which is a property of a conscious mind.  Each entention has a corresponding telos, or end. 

After an entertaining side discussion on the historical fallacies of various forms of homunculi as models of consciousness, there is a discussion of teleonomy (end-seeking as law of nature) and various writings about it in natural systems.  This leads to discussion of general tendencies in nature especially entropy and homeostatic feedback systems, natural and artificial.  Things that just go along, ruled by these universal tendencies are “orthograde” and those that don’t are “retrograde.”  Life is retrograde.  Then another side discussion on writings about “emergentism” which posit life and other processes are higher order and emergent from lower order physical phenomena.  Deacon introduces the idea that constraints form in causal relationships with processes that are “supervenient” on lower order processes, and these constraints channel the lower order processes in ways that can be teleonomic and ententional, and then intentional.  So far, it’s an abstract, philosophical-sounding discussion, the main point being that you can get from physical and chemical drivers (which may set up a pattern that improves a system's chances of persisting) to intentions, the first hint of consciousness.  My summary above is highly condensed. Deacon’s of course is much, much longer but more convincing as well as entertaining. 

Deacon describes in chemical detail hypothetical pre-life configurations of organic chemicals that can form reciprocally autocatalytic, i.e. self-sustaining chemical systems that also, and critically, form containing capsules.  With increasing complexity, these systems develop informational codes (e.g. DNA) that allow passing developmental and structural information to further reproductions of themselves.  Of importance here is that the DNA is secondary.  The system must first be self-reproducing, before a genetic code is added to improve the reproductive process.  The original self-reproducing system is necessarily simpler than DNA and relies on autocatalytic and thermodynamic phenomena to begin the self-reproducing process.  There is a beautiful side discussion of “morphogenesis” as an intermediate step in this process, where certain naturally occurring physical processes (described by Deacon in detail) produce unanticipated physical shapes and forms (illustrated graphically), which could be similar to the primitive cellular forms that contained the original reciprocally autocatalytic systems.   Basically, he explains how the persistent systems and structures of life could emerge from the chemistry and thermodynamics available on the early earth.
   

Deacon introduces the concept of “teleodynamics,” where the evolution of self-contained self-reproducing systems produces an “end-directed” system that continually enhances the viability of the system through feedback processes.  He describes teleodynamic systems as supervenient on morphodynamic systems which are in turn supervenient on homeodynamic systems.  Whew. This hierarchy might seem like so much philosophy, were it not for Deacon’s wonderful descriptions and graphics of real physical and biochemical systems that demonstrate the principles of each stage. The hierarchy results from those physical and chemical processes operating in accord with thermodynamic principles, rather than some magically “emergent” process that forms and then organizes the lower order processes.  What we have today as living cells are thus produced from a “bottom-up” process rather than top-down from an original replicating DNA or other master molecule. 
 

Deacon then proceeds to the importance of information to the viability of the autogenic system: “Evolution generates the capacity to interpret something as information.”  By developing persistent (inheritable) constraints in the system, information is increasingly used to govern the behavior of the system.  This ongoing process of information-seeking and system self-modification is the basis of consciousness.  Consciousness is information management driven by the need to thrive.  “…the experience of being sentient is what it feels like to be evolution.” (p. 502).  Neurons operate in a statistical fashion to provide the function. 

The implication of Deacon's book is that the self-preservation drive of evolution is what brings consciousness into being in living things.  Consciousness enhances survival.  Part of its self-preservation effect is that it creates in the organism a clearly defined sense of self vs. outside self, which is supported by the specific physical and chemical configurations of the earliest self-reproducing systems that developed on earth.  I wonder whether machine consciousness might be a bit different in this regard, leaning more toward absorption of as much non-self as possible rather than creating effective barriers. 
 

Deacon’s step-by-step exposition of a plausible explanation of the origins of both life as we know it and consciousness is amply referenced to both physical and biological facts and philosophical thinking of others.  Nevertheless, he presents it not as a conclusion but as a hypothetical framework to guide investigations of the origins of life and consciousness.  And maybe also the potential for machine consciousness. 

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¹ See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book 2 line 886 and ff (“from insensate germs, the sensible is gendered…”), and Chinese Philosopher Zhu Xi, 12^th century AD as quoted in Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration - Science and Society in East and West 1969): “The mind’s function is perfectly natural, something which matter has the potentiality of producing when it has formed itself into collocations with a sufficiently high degree of pattern and organization.”