Trends In Smart-Grid Policy  

Dave Roberts at Grist (apparently in an advanced state of infatuation) has a summary of the discussions at the "Discover Brilliant" smart grids conference, taking a look at "why the grid is broken and how to fix it". After Gutenberg has a few more comments - "Good Grid, Smart Grid, Fetch the Renewables".

Here's the line-up:

* California Energy Commission, Merwin Brown, Director of Transmission Research, PIER (moderator)
* Modern Grid Initiative, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Steve Pullins, Team Leader,
* Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Clark Gellings, VP of Technology Innovation
* IBM, Ron Ambrosio, Global Research Leader -- Energy & Utilities
* Itron, Mike Burns, Senior Product Manager, AMI Applications

What's wrong with the grid?

Gellings: Load is growing about twice as fast as transmission capacity, and has been for over 10 years. Lots of congestion. We've modernized virtually every industry in the U.S. except this one -- it's mechanically controlled, no sensor, no information technology, no digitization. It can't heal itself. We get info about problems too late. And that's just the beginning.

Ambrosio: Utilities are the last to digitize. IBM is eager to take on this computational problem.

Pullins: At the transmission level, on 60% of the network has SCATA, and only 2% of distribution. The grid is operating at the speed of light, but mechanically, with no sophisticated control.

Gellings: Only 7.5% of feeders have tight voltage control. We could save 1% of the nation's electricity by improving that.

Burns: The reason we want to improve all these statistics is for consumers. They need more reliability and better price mechanisms.

What's changed that grid improvements are possible now?

Gellings: Don't things work relatively well? No. The problems are hidden but pervasive. Why spend all the money to improve it? This stuff costs consumers $180 billion a year, but those costs are diffused and hidden. Just now we're seeing dialogue between utilities and regulators about improvements. It would cost about $600 billion to fix it.

Pullins: No, it would cost $0. We already have plans in place to spend over $900 billion on this stuff. We just need to redirect that money.

What is a smart grid?

Pullins: We (modern grid initiative) began in 2004; started with systems analysis. We found seven smart grid characteristics:

* motivate and incorporate consumer: a) utilize assets consumer has, mainly load assets, occasionally generation assets, b) engage consumers in conservation and efficiency efforts
* accommodate wide variety of generation and storage
* accommodate competitive markets
* resist attack
* match power quality to needs
* optimize assets
* self-healing

All the true innovation in the grid is on the margins, with consumer electronics and such, not happening from federal or utility research dollars. We're at a point where our infrastructure is becoming less and less relevant to the electric service the consumer base expects to have.

Ambrosio: Yes, things are happening at the edge, out in operations. There's an analogy with the computer industry. There was a thought in the '80s, '90s that everything was going to be distributed to the desktop. But no: high-performance central computing stayed around, it just became much more sophisticated and integrated with distributed computation. The model changed.

So, we need more processing and analysis in the poles, on the edge, just like distributed programming.

Gellings: Explaining "Galvin." He wanted perfect power that would not fail. People studied it. And ... he completely lost me.

What's the future of the interface between consumers and utilities? (Currently, it's a dumb, electromechanical meter.)

Burns: Smart metering is just about knowing more about what your customers want and need. Smart metering will allow utilities to measure consumption at an almost minute-by-minute basis. You start to understand what customers are really doing.

Smart meters not only communicate back and forth to utilities, they extend into the home, providing information to consumers about their real-time consumption. Smart meters mean smart consumers.

How do you lower emissions?

Gellings: Get more efficient. You need at least 7GW of renewables. You need nuclear and clean coal with CCS. You need plug-in hybrids.

Pullins: Right now we've got single-digit penetration of renewables. Germany, Austria, and Spain are about 13%, with a traditional grid. Denmark, with a smarter microgrid approach, is up to 32%. So that's how you enable renewables penetration: smart grid. You also get energy security, you get lower rates, and you get tons of unanticipated benefits.

The SMH has a look at cleantech refugees from Australia's coal driven energy policy - "Exodus for a place in the sun".

When it comes to renewable energy, Australia is losing some of its best researchers and ideas. In an Ernst & Young 2006 survey that ranked international markets by their attractiveness to renewable energy investors, Australia ranked 16th - fourth from the bottom. So it should come as no surprise that a significant number of Australians, well known in the sustainable energy industry, have been tempted by greener pastures.

Those names include David Hogg, David Mills from the University of Sydney, whose solar thermal technology is being funded in Silicon Valley, California, and the Australian citizen Zhengrong Shi, a PhD student from the University of NSW's groundbreaking photovoltaics laboratory, who is now one of the richest men in mainland China. Shi's Suntech Power Holdings floated on the New York Stock Exchange in December, the first non-government Chinese company to list there. Shi was attracted back to China after representatives of the Wuxi region approached him with an offer of $US6 million ($7 million) to establish a solar cell manufacturing plant.

Australian innovation is also energising industries and employment overseas. The University of NSW's buried grid solar cell technology was licensed to BP Solar in Spain. Key technologies for solar hot water such as selective coating and evacuated tubes, developed by Sydney University and local industry, are being used in manufacturing in China.

Mills says three-quarters of the world's solar collectors are made in China and 80 per cent of those use University of Sydney technology. While stronger venture capital markets are part of the attraction overseas, some push factors are assisting the flow of expertise and innovation offshore.

The Federal Government may have introduced a range of renewable incentives recently, but they pale in comparison to the deeper green of overseas initiatives, say key renewable industry players and environmental groups. This has been attributed to the Federal Government's decision not to extend and increase the mandatory renewable energy target, despite those recommendations from an independent review. Other disincentives cited as leading to movement offshore include subsidies that favour the coal industry, a reduction in funding to academia and a lack of clear and binding medium-term targets for carbon trading.

Incentives that have attracted some of our brightest include Germany's and France's so-called feed-in tariffs, which subsidise sustainable industries by paying a higher price for solar electricity that is fed into the grid; many European countries' substantial renewable energy targets over 10 to 15 years; America's production tax credit and binding renewable portfolio standards in many states; and generous manufacturing incentives in China.

The global research company New Energy Finance, based in Britain, says green electricity targets include: Britain - 20 per cent by 2020; Germany - 21 per cent by 2012; France - 21 per cent by 2010; Spain - 29.4 per cent by 2010; Italy - 25 per cent by 2010; and China - 16 per cent of total primary energy supply by 2020.

Mark Wakeham, the energy campaigner for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, believes we might miss the clean energy revolution by "hitching our economic prosperity to fossil fuels which will have to be phased out in the 21st century". "The [mandatory renewable energy target] is one of the best things the Federal Government has done on climate change, delivering billions of dollars worth of investment in renewable energy and meeting its target three years ahead of schedule," he says. "It has worked so well, in fact, that the Federal Government is trying to kill it off as it provides the coal industry with competition that they don't want." ...

Wakeham says NSW and Victorian policies to increase renewable energy targets - Victoria from a current 3 per cent to 10 per cent by 2016, and NSW from 8 per cent to 15 per cent by 2020 - will produce $6 billion worth of initiatives and will assist with the spiralling growth in electricity . "But many companies have said it would be better if there was a federal target. Most companies that operate in this country, operate in all states." He says long-term targets are necessary to ensure that power station investors in renewables are guaranteed adequate returns. "We think that all parties should be looking at a strong renewable energy target like 25 per cent of Australia's electricity coming from renewable sources by 2020." The federal Labor Party is yet to announce its position on the mandatory renewable energy target but promises "a substantial increase".

Research on energy and transport subsidies by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney found that in 2005-06 the coal industry received between $767 million and $878 million in subsidies from state and federal governments while renewable energy and energy efficiency subsidies were between $392 million and $409 million.

A UTS report on the subject concluded: "This effectively creates an uneven playing field for renewable energy, making it much more difficult to respond to climate change in the energy and transport sectors." The report's author, Chris Riedy, says five of the Australian Government's low emissions technology demonstration fund projects are "clean coal" or "clean gas" projects involving carbon capture and storage. "These get a total of $335 million. The remaining project is a solar power station, which gets $75 million." ...

David Hogg jokes that it was the beer that took him to Germany to help set up the solar technology company CSG Solar AG. However, he quickly counters with what he regards as the real reasons: "The market, the investment environment, the skilled workforce and a supportive administration."

In 2005 Hogg, an engineer, and a compatriot, Paul Basore, relocated from Sydney to Thalheim. They moved after it became apparent that ground-breaking Australian research in the field of thin film crystalline solar cell technology was not going to achieve domestic commercial success. The crystalline silicon on glass technology is the result of a 10-year research and development effort by the University of NSW and was initially commercialised with the state electricity company Pacific Power.

Hogg says that renewables in Germany mean "things like solar and wind energy", while in Australia it means "clean coal, something about deforestation, more recently uranium mining and, oh, wind and solar energy". "Less facetiously, in Germany the support for renewables is delivered through a rate-based incentive scheme," he adds. "Specifically, the electricity utilities enter into contracts with the owners of renewable systems to purchase any and all renewable electricity produced at a premium. This enables one to invest in such systems and get a positive return on investment." Subsidies are also given to companies willing to move into renewable areas and employ significant numbers.

The Age has an excellent editorial about Iraq and oil, talking about recent bouts of honesty by Alan Greenspan and Brendan Nelson - "After Iraq, no one should bank on cheap oil".

OIL is the fuel that, by powering the industrial revolution, changed the world. The global economy's need for a secure oil supply is so obvious that former US central bank chief Alan Greenspan has expressed exasperation in his new memoir that "it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil". He does not mean an outright grab for Iraq's oil. Instead, he writes that Saddam Hussein could have brought "the industrial world to its knees" had he gained control of the Strait of Hormuz and thus of oil shipments out of the Gulf. "I cannot understand why we don't name what is evident and indeed a wholly defensible pre-emptive position," he told The Guardian.

In July, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson admitted the obvious link between the war and oil, before making a hasty retreat, and Prime Minister John Howard also cited "energy demand" as one of the strategic reasons for stabilising Iraq. The resulting controversy explained the politics of denying the oil link, but this denial has unfortunately extended to public neglect of the broader and increasingly urgent issue of energy security.

The rise in the crude oil price last week to a record $US80 a barrel, even after OPEC agreed to increase production, reflects concern that skyrocketing demand will exhaust accessible reserves of oil, as well as other energy sources such as gas and uranium. A state of the region survey released at this month's APEC forum found high energy prices were seen as the greatest threat to growth. Energy security was rated a more urgent priority than climate change.

Australia's huge gas and uranium deals with China and Russia are part of a race to secure energy sources. But what is Australia doing to reduce the vulnerability associated with its oil dependency? By contrast to the costs of war, this country has underinvested in alternative fuels and forms of transport — public transport offers one of the best ways to guard against any oil shock (and cut greenhouse gas emissions too). The reliance of policy on a secure supply of cheap oil for years to come is as deluded as the claim that the Iraq war has nothing to do with oil.

Dissident Voice has a look at peak oil and global warming and some solutions to them - "No War, No Warming".

For months a movement has been developing that consciously and intentionally links the related issues of the war in Iraq/oil wars and the heating up of the earth that is disrupting the world’s climate. On Monday morning, October 22, in Washington , DC on Capitol Hill and elsewhere around the country, that movement will become visible as large numbers of people engage in nonviolent direct action to disrupt business as usual. We will be calling for an end to this criminal war and strong action to slow, stop and reverse global warming (www.nowarnowarming.org).

These issues are connected, of course, by oil. Everyone who’s got their head screwed on straight knows that the reason for the invasion of Iraq was oil. The US government is occupying Iraq both for its oil and to try to turn it into a US-friendly military base from which it can better control the entire region.

Why? It’s not just because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice, Wolfowitz and the neo-cons are motivated by we’re-the-rulers-of-the-world ideology. There is actually a perverse logic to what they’re doing, particularly given their personal connections to the oil industry.

The US and the world are in a deepening energy crisis. Easily accessible oil and natural gas are getting hard to find even as the demand for and competition over energy throughout the world accelerates. There is agreement among those who study this issue that we are either right at or very soon will be at “peak oil,” a point where as much oil that is in the ground will have been found and used as there is oil still remaining. And the big problem is that those remaining reserves are getting harder and more expensive to bring out of the ground.

There is a common sense solution to this dilemma. Instead of war in Iraq escalating into war with Iran and who knows where else, the US could lead the world by using its technological know-how and resources to advance a worldwide clean energy revolution. We could rapidly undercut the appeal of Al-Qaeda by withdrawing our troops from the Middle East and promoting, instead, huge solar energy farms in this sun-drenched region of the world. We could help the formerly colonized countries of the Global South who are currently developing their economies by using greenhouse gas emitting coal or dangerous nuclear power. We could help them shift to renewable energy technology to obtain energy via solar panels, wind turbines, the tides or the earth (geo-thermal). What kind of world do we face if we don’t stand up, if we don’t rise up to demand a serious course correction?

A report was put out this spring by the CNA Corporation, a national security think tank, written by six retired admirals and five retired generals, including the former Army chief of staff and George W. Bush’s former chief Middle East peace negotiator. In it, in the words of an Associated Press story, they “called upon the U.S. government to make major cuts in emissions of gases that cause global warming.”

The report warned that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger, instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. ‘The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,’ the 35-page report predicted. ‘Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations,’ former US Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan told Associated Press Radio. In a veiled reference to Bush’s refusal to join an international treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the report said the U.S. government ‘must become a more constructive partner’ with other nations to fight global warming and cope with its consequences.”

The options before us are crystal clear. Down one road, the one we’re now on, lies a cascading series of oil and water wars, climate disasters and ecological devastation. Down the other lies a turn toward peaceful resolution of conflicts, energy conservation, efficiency and a clean energy revolution, and social and economic justice.

Links:

* Japan Focus - Kicking Your Head to Get Rid of a Headache: Palm Oil and the Imminent Extinction of the Orangutan
* AFP - Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier sounds climate change alarm
* WorldChanging - The Legal Climate on Climate Risk
* Beyond The Beyond - Venice: Cruelly Trampled to Death by Climate Change, and, uh, Tourists
* Beyond The Beyond - Spime Watch: Ponoko personal manufacturing. "Ponoko is the world's first personal manufacturing platform". Well - maybe one day...
* Chemical Science - The Artificial Leaf: A bright future
* Smart Grid News - Duke Energy Plots Course Beyond the Smart Grid
* Grist - Why coal is the enemy of the human race: Reason no. 836,372
* The Daily Green - Peak Coal? Analyst Sees Demand Outpacing Supply
* Mobjectivist - Logistic Model for HL purely a Birth Model
* Energy Tribune - Dawn in the Desert - Saudi High Tech Paying Off at Ghawar Oil Field
* OhMyNews - Chris Cook: The Real Impact of Sanctions Against Iran
* TreeHugger - Get Wood: Grain Surfboards Say its Good
* Always On - Social Entrepreneurship
* Fast Company - The Unplanned Obsolescence Of Grameen's Village Phone Program
* Kiva.org - Kiva - loans that change lives. Rather than relying on banks to do micro-credit, why don't you do it yourself ?
* Cryptogon - U.S. Government’s Plan to Protect You From Terrorist Livestock. "Animal Farm meets the Marx Brothers". An arphid for you and an arphid for your animals.
* Cryptogon - Great-Grandma Betty Pleads Innocent to Resisting Arrest Over Dead Grass. Just imagine if these guys could see the state of Canberra's lawns - the whole town (apart from a few people in Red Hill) would get locked up. First they came for the grandmothers...
* Pravda - American spy satellite downed in Peru as US nuclear attack on Iran thwarted. Well - Pravda means "Truth" I think so I guess this must be true, even if it just sounds like a really novel conspiracy theory. And there I was thinking the new Pravda was all about page 3 girls...