GridWise  

WorldChanging has a post on a smart grid experiment in the US Pcific Northwest.

The US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in cooperation with Whirlpool and IBM, has embarked on a year-long experiment in smart power distribution called GridWise -- and it could prove to be the sign that a revolution is at hand.

Smart grids and distributed energy are central to the bright green energy model. By decentralizing power generation and adding digital intelligence to the power network, we can build an energy infrastructure that's more flexible, better able to take advantage of renewable energy technologies, and more resilient in times of crisis. Groups as diverse as the Pacific Gas & Electric utility and Greenpeace UK support the concept, and an increasingly robust set of technologies make it possible to monitor and control how one uses -- and produces -- electricity.

The GridWise project connects 300 homes in the cities of Yakima, Washington and Gresham, Oregon to a new intelligent power network combining real-time monitoring of consumption and pricing, Internet-based usage controls, and appliances able to respond to power grid signals indicating problems by temporarily reducing energy use; this smart grid will be coupled with a distributed generation microturbine network. If all goes as planned, the result will be decreased demand on the utility and lower cost for the consumers. This will increase both the stability and the efficiency of the power grid.

The cornerstone of the GridWise project is the concept of "demand response" -- automation allowing customers to reduce or shift consumption during times of peak demand or higher prices. This automation shows up in both web-accessible usage controls and "smart appliances" able to both display power consumption information and respond to power network instability by cutting back on use for a few seconds or minutes. PNNL researchers believe that only 30% of a power grid's customers need to have such smart appliances to make a substantive difference in both demand and grid performance. Although only 300 households will be involved in this experiment, researchers are confident that GridWise will become a standard part of the regional power grid.

Elsewhere on the US West coast, California is further expanding its solar power programs. Its a shame Australian politicians on LNG terminal lobbying trips to California don't pick up some hints about the future of power generation while they are there.

The California state public utilities commission has approved the California Solar Initiative, a massive new program to support the expansion of solar power in the state, USD$2.8 billion going for incentives for solar power retrofits and USD$400 million going for incentives for adding solar to new construction. At USD$3.2 billion over 11 years, this puts California second only to Germany in investment in solar power. The plan's passage is the direct result of an outpouring of public support. According to Renewable Energy Access, the plan will lead to...

...the installation of approximately 3000 MW of solar energy, roughly the power equivalent of six large natural-gas fired power plants. [...] public support for the plan was repeatedly mentioned as a critical factor in bringing this plan to the CPUC. Over the last three months, 50,000 people have written to the California Public Utilities Commissioners to ask them to pass a long-term solar rebate program - more public comment than the CPUC has received on any issue they have ever considered, including the 2001 energy crisis.

WorldChanging also has posts on the Norwegian seed vault idea (which they then extend to a cool plan for a "backup" of civilisation - though I'm not so sure about the siting of this on the moon - just make lots of copies and scatter them around the planet) along with one on developments in biodiesel from algae - both of which I've mentioned recently.

It's a bit staggering to think on this kind of scale. This isn't just a warehouse for seeds in the off-season; the Norwegian seed vault is explicitly a project meant to be used only in the face of civilization-threatening catastrophes. Less-encompassing seed banks have already helped to restore agriculture in areas torn by decades of conflict. This bank will help to restore agriculture globally after planetary-scale disasters.

Seeds aren't all we need to have backups for. Right now, everything that we know as a species, everything we believe as individuals, everything that we are as a global civilization could be gone in an instant. Human civilization could fall victim to an uncharted asteroid crashing into the Earth, pandemic disease (natural or otherwise), or even global chaos from the worst-case peak oil scenarios; by having our civilization and all that we know in just one place -- the Earth -- we are extremely vulnerable. Engineers refer to this as a "single point of failure" problem: the loss of a single element dooms the entire system. Good engineers try to avoid these sorts of problems whenever possible. Right now, the Earth is our single point of failure.

Here is my overly-ambitous proposal, one that makes the Norwegian seed vault look lazy: we need to create an "off-site backup" for human civilization. We should create a backup of everything that we, as a world, know and believe. This would include everything from scientific knowledge to oral histories, proprietary research to genetic maps, great religious texts to comic books. Everything. This would become an ongoing, living record of who we are as a global civilization. Once collected (which would undoubtedly take a generation or more), the backup must be updated regularly to keep it complete. And it must be someplace off-site, someplace not vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed along with the original.

When I say that the backup would need to be "off-site", I mean somewhere off of Earth. Our Moon is a good candidate for such a backup. It's easy to get to (relatively speaking) and not vulnerable to the sorts of erosion one finds in a world with an atmosphere and active geology (the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts, for example, will last millions of years). Solar power could provide more than enough power for the facility, and the site would be visible from everywhere on Earth.

Such a project would have some extraordinary benefits, even before any disaster hit. Compiling that much data over what would likely be a very long term would require research into novel storage technologies. Concerns about media format, translation, and data compression would be confronted, along with seemingly intractable issue of copyright. The Off-Site Backup project would force us to answer many (if not most) of the critical questions of the digital age.

But the most important benefit would be that the Off-Site Backup Project would allow human civilization to rebuild after the unthinkable happens -- and it does happen. We've written repeatedly about the possibility of a major asteroid strike, and other overwhelming crises -- from the collapse of La Palma causing a tsunami that would wipe out the east coast of the Americas to massive "supervolcanos" -- are all too possible. In many respects, we're lucky that humankind has lasted as long as it has.

Always On has a brief note on the recognition of the need for alternative energy sources by the major Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists.

I had a front row seat at the Churchill Club's 8th Annual Top Trends Debate Thursday night in Palo Alto.

Part forecast of the future and part roast, venture luminaries John Doerr, Steve Jurvetson, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Ann Winblad promoted their views of tomorrow.

When the program started, John Doerr was first to make his prediction. Effectively, what he said was "Green is Good," or specifically, he took the words from Tom Friedman, "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue."

The classic investment opportunity exists where there is a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. Whether oil prices are $60 or $20, the fundamental problem is that there is a finite amount of oil. It's also a fact that oil pollutes our environment in a way that's not sustainable.

A price of $60 a barrel provides obscene cash flow to bad guys in bad places who will use that wealth to make the world a worse and more dangerous place.

The issue isn't: "Should we drill for oil in Alaska or not?" (having been to Alaska, my vote is "yes" in that Alaska is so vast, nobody is going to notice drilling on the small area proposed). The real issue is: "How do we create a sensible long-term energy plan?"

Alternative energy such as wind, solar, and hydro are key to this as are fuel cells and biomass. Wind farms currently can provide enough energy for 1.6 million homes. By 2020, it will be ten times that number.