Tag Archives: electrical grid

Environs

A Smarter Smart Grid

If you live somewhere rather toasty you know how painful your electricity bills can be during the summer months. So, wouldn’t it be good to have a system automatically find you the cheapest electricity when you need it most? Welcome to the artificially intelligent smarter smart grid.

From the New Scientist:

An era is coming in which artificially intelligent systems can manage your energy consumption to save you money and make the electricity grid even smarter

IF YOU’RE tired of keeping track of how much you’re paying for energy, try letting artificial intelligence do it for you. Several start-up companies aim to help people cut costs, flex their muscles as consumers to promote green energy, and usher in a more efficient energy grid – all by unleashing smart software on everyday electricity usage.

Several states in the US have deregulated energy markets, in which customers can choose between several energy providers competing for their business. But the different tariff plans, limited-time promotional rates and other products on offer can be confusing to the average consumer.

A new company called Lumator aims to cut through the morass and save consumers money in the process. Their software system, designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, asks new customers to enter their energy preferences – how they want their energy generated, and the prices they are willing to pay. The software also gathers any available metering measurements, in addition to data on how the customer responds to emails about opportunities to switch energy provider.

A machine-learning system digests that information and scans the market for the most suitable electricity supply deal. As it becomes familiar with the customer’s habits it is programmed to automatically switch energy plans as the best deals become available, without interrupting supply.

“This ensures that customers aren’t taken advantage of by low introductory prices that drift upward over time, expecting customer inertia to prevent them from switching again as needed,” says Lumator’s founder and CEO Prashant Reddy.

The goal is not only to save customers time and money – Lumator claims it can save people between $10 and $30 a month on their bills – but also to help introduce more renewable energy into the grid. Reddy says power companies have little idea whether or not their consumers want to get their energy from renewables. But by keeping customer preferences on file and automatically switching to a new service when those preferences are met, Reddy hopes renewable energy suppliers will see the demand more clearly.

A firm called Nest, based in Palo Alto, California, has another way to save people money. It makes Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats that integrate machine learning to understand users’ habits. Energy companies in southern California and Texas offer deals to customers if they allow Nest to make small adjustments to their thermostats when the supplier needs to reduce customer demand.

“The utility company gives us a call and says they’re going to need help tomorrow as they’re expecting a heavy load,” says Matt Rogers, one of Nest’s founders. “We provide about 5 megawatts of load shift, but each home has a personalised demand response. The entire programme is based on data collected by Nest.”

Rogers says that about 5000 Nest users have opted-in to such load-balancing programmes.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Treehugger.

Environs

The Future of the Grid

Two common complaints dog the sustainable energy movement: first, energy generated from the sun and wind is not always present; second, renewable energy is too costly. A new study debunks these notions, and shows that cost effective renewable energy could power our needs 99 percent of the time by 2030.

[div class=attrib]From ars technica:[end-div]

You’ve probably heard the argument: wind and solar power are well and good, but what about when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? But it’s always windy and sunny somewhere. Given a sufficient distribution of energy resources and a large enough network of electrically conducting tubes, plus a bit of storage, these problems can be overcome—technologically, at least.

But is it cost-effective to do so? A new study from the University of Delaware finds that renewable energy sources can, with the help of storage, power a large regional grid for up to 99.9 percent of the time using current technology. By 2030, the cost of doing so will hit parity with current methods. Further, if you can live with renewables meeting your energy needs for only 90 percent of the time, the economics become positively compelling.

“These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive,” said study co-author Willett Kempton, a professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Marine Science and Policy. “The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage—which we did by an exhaustive search—and to calculate costs correctly.”

By exhaustive, Kempton is referring to the 28 billion combinations of inland and offshore wind and photovoltaic solar sources combined with centralized hydrogen, centralized batteries, and grid-integrated vehicles analyzed in the study. The researchers deliberately overlooked constant renewable sources of energy such as geothermal and hydro power on the grounds that they are less widely available geographically.

These technologies were applied to a real-world test case: that of the PJM Interconnection regional grid, which covers parts of states from New Jersey to Indiana, and south to North Carolina. The model used hourly consumption data from the years 1999 to 2002; during that time, the grid had a generational capacity of 72GW catering to an average demand of 31.5GW. Taking in 13 states, either whole or in part, the PJM Interconnection constitutes one fifth of the USA’s grid. “Large” is no overstatement, even before considering more recent expansions that don’t apply to the dataset used.

The researchers constructed a computer model using standard solar and wind analysis tools. They then fed in hourly weather data from the region for the whole four-year period—35,040 hours worth. The goal was to find the minimum cost at which the energy demand could be met entirely by renewables for a given proportion of the time, based on the following game plan:

  1. When there’s enough renewable energy direct from source to meet demand, use it. Store any surplus.
  2. When there is not enough renewable energy direct from source, meet the shortfall with the stored energy.
  3. When there is not enough renewable energy direct from source, and the stored energy reserves are insufficient to bridge the shortfall, top up the remaining few percent of the demand with fossil fuels.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the precise mix required depends upon exactly how much time you want renewables to meet the full load. Much more surprising is the amount of excess renewable infrastructure the model proposes as the most economic. To achieve a 90-percent target, the renewable infrastructure should be capable of generating 180 percent of the load. To meet demand 99.9 percent of the time, that rises to 290 percent.

“So much excess generation of renewables is a new idea, but it is not problematic or inefficient, any more than it is problematic to build a thermal power plant requiring fuel input at 250 percent of the electrical output, as we do today,” the study argues.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Bangui Windfarm, Ilocos Norte, Philippines. Courtesy of
Wikipedia.[end-div]

Technica

A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, electricity failed to arrive in New York City, plunging the eight million inhabitants of the Big Apple–along with 40 million other people throughout the northeastern U.S. and Ontario–into a tense night of darkness. After one power plant in Ohio had shut down, elevated power loads overheated high-voltage lines, which sagged into trees and short-circuited. Like toppling dominoes, the failures cascaded through the electrical grid, knocking 265 power plants offline and darkening 24,000 square kilometers.

That incident–and an even more extensive blackout that affected 56 million people in Italy and Switzerland a month later–called attention to pervasive problems with modern civilization’s vital equivalent of a biological circulatory system, its interconnected electrical networks. In North America the electrical grid has evolved in piecemeal fashion over the past 100 years. Today the more than $1-trillion infrastructure spans the continent with millions of kilometers of wire operating at up to 765,000 volts. Despite its importance, no single organization has control over the operation, maintenance or protection of the grid; the same is true in Europe. Dozens of utilities must cooperate even as they compete to generate and deliver, every second, exactly as much power as customers demand–and no more. The 2003 blackouts raised calls for greater government oversight and spurred the industry to move more quickly, through its Intelli-Grid Consortium and the Grid-Wise program of the U.S. Department of Energy, to create self-healing systems for the grid that may prevent some kinds of outages from cascading. But reliability is not the only challenge–and arguably not even the most important challenge–that the grid faces in the decades ahead.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]