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 21st 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.
[2] Mokhtari,
Melissa, A New Approach to Decentralized Energy, in Blockchain at Berkeley: https://blockchainatberkeley.blog/a-new-approach-to-decentralized-energy-5ab2b5460fa0
[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.
[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.
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