Too good to fail: What’s wrong with the electric grid?

By Elisa WoodJuly 5, 2012

The temperature is 100 degrees and we have no air conditioning, no running water, no telephone and no Internet. It’s been 60 hours since our household lost electricity because of the super derecho, a rare surprise storm that swept ten US states and the nation’s capital on June 29.

About 5 million of us suddenly are living in conditions of a century earlier. And as we fumble in the dark, it’s easy to see how vulnerable our profound reliance on electricity makes us.

The notion of grid reliability is embedded deeply in the American psyche. We are so accustomed to electricity flowing, we can barely comprehend its absence. By habit, we still flip on the light switch when entering a room, even after the power has been out for hours.

We have good reason to trust. After all, behind the switch is the world’s largest machine, the North American power grid. With 211,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5,800 power plants feeding electricity to our homes and businesses, the grid is an engineering wonder.

A wonder – until a storm, or a heat wave, or even a squirrel chewing the right wire in the right place knocks out power to large swaths of customers.

It is the grid’s size and interconnectivity that makes it remarkable and efficient, but also susceptible to widespread mishap. We saw that most clearly in the Northeast Blackout of 2003, when a cascading event caused failures that tumbled quickly from neighborhood to neighborhood, state to state, finally leaving 50 million without power.

But the American consumer generally does not view a blackout as a sign of an inherent problem with our electric grid. Following the June 9 derecho, about 30,000 workers, some borrowed from utilities as far away as Texas and Oklahoma, went to work restoring power in the Mid-Atlantic and nearby states. Still, consumers will be angry at the length of time it takes. And if the acrimony is as great as it was in New England last year following the freakHalloween nor’easter, politicians will take up the cause, regulators will investigate and some utility executives may find their jobs threatened.

If our lights fail and aren’t fixed quickly, we believe someone must be to blame. The problem can’t possibly be the nature of the interconnected grid itself. In the consumer’s mind, electricity is like air; it’s just there for us. If it’s not, someone messed up.

The energy industry refers to this as electricity’s invisibility. In many ways it speaks to the product’s success. Who in America ponders whether or not to buy electricity? It’s a given that we will connect our homes to the grid, pay the monthly bill and the power will flow.

But, this invisibility, this success, is a failing too.

Power companies throughout much of the nation are striving to make the grid less vulnerable by smartening it, and some of this smartening relies on consumer interaction, taking control over our electricity consumption through new digital technologies.  It includes installing smart meters and energy displays, building  microgrids and developing more solar energy and other forms of distributed generation, which decentralize the grid, and therefore takeaway at least some of the exposure that comes with size. (Think the Death Star in the movie Star Wars.).

Suddenly we need to pay attention to electricity, and we’d rather let it stay invisible.

So to make smart grid work, the energy industry needs to figure out what makes the consumer work. A great deal of study is now underway on human behavior and energy. The goal is to encourage us to embrace smart energy technologies, so that we will use electricity more efficiently. It’s been tough going. Most consumers see no underlying problem with the electric grid. If it’s not broke, why fix it?

I can’t say I like being without air conditioning and water. But maybe the occasional loss of comfort is a good thing, an eye opener, a reminder that we need to contemplate our electric system’s inherent weakness and work to strengthen it. The grid can break. It is not too good to fail.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work is available at RealEnergyWriters.com

Googlifying the electric grid

By Elisa Wood

February 12, 2009

If you showed Alexander Graham Bell cell phone towers, he’d be stumped. But if you let Thomas Edison tinker with our electricity grid, he’d know just what to do — not because of his genius, but because electric transmission has changed little since Edison’s day. Telephone technology advanced; electricity did not. So says the Department of Energy. http://www.oe.energy.gov/1165.htm

Thus, we are now playing catch-up and pursuing a new, smart grid. This means we will incorporate digital technology which, among other things, allows for two-way communication. The grid will speak to us and we will speak back through our actions. The average householder will know the price of power as it constantly changes throughout the day, and based on the information, choose when to buy it.

The implications to society are huge. Like the Internet, which democratized information retrieval, the smart grid opens doors for new control by the common folk, in this case over energy management, now the domain of remote utilities and grid operators. Collectively, we will determine what kind of energy the nation uses and when. In a sense, we all become energy policymakers through our purchasing choices.

So it’s no surprise that Google, whose goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” announced this week that it will step in and help with the smartening. Google is not an energy company, but it understands how to make information retrieval user friendly – and this will be crucial to the success of the smart grid. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html

John Petersen, chairman of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, understands this need for simplicity in communicating energy concepts, as he shows in his creation of the Energy Orb. In today’s Energy Efficiency Markets podcast (www.realenergywriters.com), Petersen discusses Oberlin’s trial and error in getting students interested in managing their energy use. Initially, the college set up a website that monitored dorm energy use with colorful charts and graphs. But Peterson quickly realized it was too “techno-geeky.”

So taking a page from Ambient’s Stock Orb, a ball that glows different colors to show stock market activity, Petersen developed the Energy Orb. The glowing balls are placed in dorms, so students can pass by and see the buildings power consumption in real time. Red means high consumption, green is low. There is no need to get online and analyze charts. The Orb reveals the immediate truth. Dorms compete against each other to maximize efficiency by watching what their orbs say.

The Energy Orb is just one way we can googlify energy information management. Many other pilot projects are in the works that simplify information retrieval and encourage people to conserve. We’d like to use this space – and our weekly podcast – to feature some of these smart grid experiments. We invite you to submit them for consideration to realenergywriters@comcast.net

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Toasting Pop-Tarts cheap: How electricity may solve our energy woes

By Elisa Wood

October 23, 2008

We tend to talk about electricity in terms of its problems — it degrades the environment, costs too much and messes up scenic views. But the Manhattan Institute’s Peter Huber takes a different stand in his new report “The Million-Volt Answer to Oil.”

Huber says electric power may be the cheap, efficient resource we seek to give America energy independence. He divides energy into two camps: electric power and transportation fuel. Our energy woes stem from our dependence on oil for transportation. To get over $4 per gallon gas, he says, we need to connect our transportation fleet and home heating systems to cheap 4 cents/kWh electricity.

“We spend roughly half as much on electricity—about $350 billion a year—as we’re currently spending on $100-a-barrel oil, and electrically powered systems do more, faster and better, than oil-fired alternatives,” he says in the report.

Huber’s theory opens the door wide for use of plug-in hybrid cars and electric heat pumps. “If we could deliver electricity straight to electric motors connected to our wheels, it would deliver miles at a price that most current car engines could match only on gasoline priced under a dollar a gallon. Delivered to our homes at off-peak prices, electrical heat would cost homeowners a lot less than $4-a-gallon heating oil,” he says.

Of course, electricity doesn’t cost 4/kWh cents everywhere. Some places it is 19 cents/kWh. And no matter where you live, the price goes up and down dramatically all day, depending on how many customers use power at any given time. When the East Coast is winding down its work day and its electricity prices fall, the West Coast is still going full tilt and its electricity prices rise. The trick is to transmit the cheap power quickly from place to place, and keep it rolling over four time zones by building a new and sophisticated high-voltage transmission backbone that can handle such movement.

“A kilowatt-hour of electricity toasts as many Pop-Tarts in Palo Alto as it does in Poughkeepsie; an efficient, integrated market with cheap, long-distance transmission available would charge everyone the same price for toasting them,” he says.

The technology exists, and it is not terribly pricey, to create such a transmission system. Huber estimates that building a 21,000-mile grid to network all major sources electricity, and push wind power from the Midwest to the coasts, would add roughly 0.3 cents/kWh to the current 9-cent/kWh average retail price of electricity.

He points out that a single 765-kV transmission line can move “almost 1 percent (4 GW) of the total average power generation of the entire United States, or 0.5 percent of the power that Americans collectively consume during the most power-hungry minute of the year.”

With such a transmission system in place, developers could build power plants and wind farms in rural expanses, rather than the crowded coasts where people object to the intrusion on their space.

Last, he points out that very few US power plants now use imported oil as a fuel, and instead use domestic sources, increasingly renewable. “With electricity, America controls its own destiny,” he says.

As Huber tells it, electricity is not part of the energy problem, but is the overlooked solution.

See the report at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_03.htm.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.