Special Report: 9.22.2009
Posted by M Martin
on Tuesday, September 22, 2009
GRID WEEK, THE SMART GRID & CHU
What the Energy Secretary said
Yesterday was day one of four of GridWeek, an annual conference on The Smart Grid, held in Washington, D.C. The primary event on Day 1, also tagged "international day," was an opening address from Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy -- details below. Before diving into that, some important notes.
Last year's event was covered here in three early-2009 columns. If you're interested in what's happening here -- to figure out if you can sell anything,or will be able to in the near future -- you might read, in this order:
OK, fast-forward to NOW. The Smart Grid (TSG) has had a much better year than anything else. It has been the subject of a gazillion words and discussions (and a few billion in U.S. government investment). It is the repository of hope for the future. And so forth. This year's GridWeek has seen attendance soar (it's either doubled or gone from 900 to 1,500, depending on who is speaking) . . . the thing is actually SOLD OUT. And the number of media people in attendance has jumped, too, from 40 in round numbers in 2008 to more than 80 expected this time.
SECRETARY CHU'S TSG AGENDA
Let's do it all . . . over 30 years?
One big problem for politicians, regulators, and administrators -- such as a DoE secretary -- is that serious things take serious amounts of time. TSG might happen if the country could hold a single thought in its mind for, say, 20 years. But at best Barack Obama will be President for eight. It's unlikely that Chu -- even if he did win the Nobel Prize -- will stay in his current slot for two decades. It's also distinctly possible that what Chu wants us to do now (his priorities) will be changed over time . . . if not by him, then by his successors.
Yes, certainly that's obvious, but it's worth remembering. TSG is going to take . . . well, it's going to take forever to happen. It's needed NOW. It can't happen that fast. This is not an issue on which Presidential candidates will campaign. An example: Last year's speech from a different Energy Secretary included a focus on EHV (extra-high voltage) lines; I discussed the idea in the columns linked above.
Yet this year, while EHV was mentioned (and a slide slapped up on the wall), Chu didn't emphasize it. Certainly, the case for EHV is huge. To use Chu's phrase: The nation has 7% of its people living where most of its wind resources are -- "both a good and a bad thing."
GOOD: With people thinly spread on the ground where the wind is (and where the sun shines a lot, by the way), there should be minimal citizen opposition to things like the erection of numerous wind turbines in windfarms. We can generate a lot of electricity from these places.
BAD: With the bulk of our people living elsewhere, if we generate power out there in the midst of nowhere, we're going to have to transport it -- in bulk -- to urban areas. That will require EHV lines. We haven't built them. We will need to build them. It will cost a bundle!
. . . and that's NOT necessarily a piece of TSG. It's just a logical, next-step build-out of the national grid, designed to accommodate a surge in electricity generated via renewables!
WHAT TSG WILL BRING, SOMEDAY
A laundry list.
Here are highlights from Chu's laundry list of improvements TSG will bring to the national grid:
1. The huge power outage of 2003, which put roughly 50 million people in the dark, wouldn't happen with TSG, Chu said. The solution is to put phasors in place. These things will sense power going out-of-phase early enough to allow the system to respond automatically (one the grid system is fully automated) -- or, in the current situation, 30 or 40 minutes ahead of another power crash, giving human beings enough notice that they can response and avert it.
2. There are serious issues with wind power, basically summed up as "the wind doesn't always blow and is erratic." The sun also sometimes stops shining without notice; Chu showed a graph of a decline (on a single day) of solar PV output of 81% in a given area "when the sun went behind a cloud." A power supply system that's supposed to be reliable and responsive and provide 100% of the power all of us expect must cope -- instantaneously -- with this. Only TSG can do it, Chu indicated.
3. ENERGY STORAGE is a solution that must be pursued alongside TSG. Why? See #2, directly above. If we store enough energy -- perhaps a weeks' worth, Chu said (I am not kidding) -- we can respond instantly to a sudden drop in power output by renewables. His favorite alternative (apparently) is an energy storage system composed of a system of dams -- the water is pumped up to higher elevations, and then allowed to come back down, generating energy. Doesn't this sound like it won't work? Chu claimed the energy loss due to water evaporation and energy need to do the uphill pumping was 20%. Therefore, you store 100 units of energy now, and you can extract 80 units later. In theory.
There are, of course, other energy storage ideas. While Chu did note that the $2.4 billion that the Obama DOE has put behind battery research was "the biggest single investment in battery research in history," he didn't spend a lot of time otherwise on batteries. From what I heard, he also favors compressed-air energy storage.
How does energy storage interface with TSG? You need a system that responds in one second (or two seconds, he said) -- much faster than a human-run system can respond (i.e., now) -- to those shifts in the weather that make solar/wind so unreliable. Energy storage is the answer, he said, because maintaining -- on into the future -- a "spinning reserve" (a coal power plant operating on standby) would be expensive and polluting.
4. LOAD MANAGEMENT is another solution. A serious piece of our national electricity grid is underutilized; we're wasting 5% of our power, Chu said. That doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot, and if we can fix it, we can save big. Once again, the answer is automation (TSG). Additionally, he spent some time on how TSG can better enable demand response.
This piece is interesting, and I can see how electrical distributors -- as product providers -- will interface here. The idea is that "real-time pricing" will discourage citizens and businesses from using power at peak times. Not everyone can shift a lot of power consumption to off-peak periods, but everyone can shift a little. This adds up. Chu presented a chart of the experience in northern California (where he is from, I believe) -- showing how DR created a big hole in peak demand when needed.
Now, how is this going to work in your house? Chu noted that it was totally unrealistic to expect the average citizen to program his appliances (or a home network system that manages all of a given house's appliances), when the average citizen can't handle the programming of a day/night setback thermostat. What's needed, he said, is a group of "buttons" on an appliance -- "saver, supersaver, moderate saver, and guilty-as-charged!" That's what he said.
5. ELECTRIC VEHICLES are another problem for the national (and local) grid -- to which TSG is the solution. Chu noted that our power system is not ready for adoption of PHEVs by 30% to 50% of the population. Fortunately, he said, it's going to take time to get there. As of September 2009, he sees potential for 1 million PHEVs to be added to the national vehicle fleet over the next 3 to 4 years.
Interested in PHEVs? See the August Special Report columns on them -- An Exploration and EVs: Important to You?
Chu seemed to look forward to the day when we DO have 50% of our vehicles powered by electricity rather than gasoline/diesel. He didn't say when that day is going to come. But he seemed to relish the prospect of having tens of millions of cars, each with the capacity to store 50 or 60 kWh. This is going to put the average citizen in the energy-storage business,he said -- once we have this rolling national asset, IT will be the energy storage solution of choice, he indicated.
This will be "the only time in my life I can buy low and sell high," he said. The idea is that you will charge your PHEV at night, when the utility sells power to you at maybe 8 cents per kWh -- and sell it back to the utility during the day, when the utility needs it, at 20 cents per kWh (and the utility, he said, would sell that power to someone who really needs it during the peak period at 40 cents).
A DOSE OF REALISM WITH YOUR FANTASY
A serious approach to creating a future.
We're not going to discuss your fantasy life here. And we're not going to go into mine, but let's do go into Chu's.
Stephen Chu's fantasy life became crystal-clear during this speech. He sees a way clear to a national electrical system in which 30% to 50% of our electric power comes from renewables and other alternative resources. His goal, clearly, is to get to a place where coal-burning plants are the exception, not the rule.
There is, however, a huge dose of realism in this fantasy. He's not talking about banning coal-burning plants now, and letting people deal with the consequences. In fact, this is the third time I've heard him speak since he was installed as DoE's secretary (which happened 1/21/09). He's previously noted that coal isn't going away soon, and that we need nuclear power and will for decades.
Instead, his vision is a realistic approach to what we need to do. Building out TSG is one big component of getting to that future (along with the EHV expansion of the grid, addition of big energy storage resources,and more).
As noted above, my problem with the Chu fantasy are specific: You have to know (and he has to know) that whatever he puts in place could well be demolished, in nanoseconds, by the next Energy Secretary. Perhaps his idea is to create such a compelling vision, and to put all of the pieces to get to that vision in motion, that the next guy/gal won't be tempted to blow it up.
At heart, the guy is realistic. He spent a tiny piece of his speech noting that he has made serious strides in cutting his home's energy bill. They've got it down by $100/month now, thanks to these moves -- apparently, Chu devoted a 5-day vacation in 2009 to thinking this through. He thinks, he said, they can take another $50/month out of the bill. Obviously, these are the moves of someone who takes personal consumption seriously. Were we all this "green," we'd have a lot fewer problems.
But in the next breath, Chu noted that he was, well, weird. Most people aren't going to spend five hours on the Internet looking for the perfect skylight. He doesn't expect that to happen. The key, he said, was to make saving energy very easy for the average citizen -- and he referred again to that concept of "buttons" each of us could press to save energy.
I'm not sure how the buttons happen. But I am sure that an Energy Secretary who both has an all-encompassing vision and yet is realistic to understand that his personal behavior isn't typical might actually get us part of the way to wherever we need to be.
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