The Last Green Mile  

AlwaysOn has a look at smart grids company GridPoint and their electricity management system - "Gridpoint: The Last Green Mile".

When we caught up with Gridpoint’s Vice President for Product Strategy, Brian Golden, he wanted to make sure it was clear they offer a lot more than storage. Gridpoint’s “Connect Series” product is a turnkey electricity management system that can be installed in light commercial or multi-unit residential buildings or at a utility substation, in order to monitor and manage electricity usage. And Gridpoint, who already counts among their customers virtually every major power utility in the USA, is one of a handful of companies who offer a suite of products to manage electrical resources more intelligently.

But Gridpoint’s “Connect Series” unit, about the size of a small refrigerator, is the only product currently available that not only helps electricity consumers and electric utilities manage energy more intelligently, each unit is also capable of storing up to 12 kWh of usable AC electricity. Gridpoint already has hundreds of these units in pilot installations throughout the USA.

With distributed sources of electricity now arriving in new, innovative forms, and capacity increasing exponentially, distributed storage is the final step necessary to completely transform our energy landscape. Wind power is intermittant, solar power peaks between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. - but with distributed storage available, it doesn’t matter.

As Golden explained, there are several benefits to distributed storage. During power outages, stored electricity can be discharged back into the grid beyond the break in the line, maintaining reliable constant power. In markets where energy pricing is tiered, electricity can be stored during low off peak rates and discharged when rates are higher. Flattening the load by pushing power into the grid during peak hours of demand from distributed sources can relieve congestion on the grid. And, of course, distributed renewable energy sources such as wind and solar can be captured during their limited hours of collection, and utilized 24 hours per day from storage systems. Without distributed storage, new distributed sources of power cannot make nearly the same impact, and Gridpoint is the first company out there offering a product in the market, right now, that solves this challenge.

When I asked Golden what one of these units cost, he said they are about $10,000 to the consumer. Given the current prices of multi-family dwellings or light commercial buildings, that really doesn’t sound like very much. But as a tool to arbitrage between higher peak demand rates and lower off-peak rates, at $10,000 a pop, the unit has a fairly long payback. As a tool to flatten demand for a utility in order to prevent spot prices from spiking, however, the unit is already economical. It is also already economical for new land developments, where the storage capacity offered by Gridpoint’s products, combined with on-site sources of electricity from (for example) photovoltaics, significantly reduces the need for infrastructure to connect to the existing electrical grid - paying for itself immediately.

In any case, as Golden pointed out, we are only a few years away from batteries becoming far more economical. ...

Renewable Energy Access has an article on the need to commence construction of the smart grid - "Creating a 21st Century Grid".

In 1957, as Eisenhower began his second term as U.S. President, the first satellite launched into orbit and the first commercial nuclear reactor came online, electrical workers all over the country were installing the world's most advanced transmission and distribution (T&D) system. Today, much of that T&D system installed 50 years ago remains in place, holding together a patchwork grid for ever-expanding electricity markets.

Now in 2007 – the age of the internet, personal digital media and distributed energy — the grid has failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing technological landscape. While most industries rely on technologies that have been invented or updated in the last few years, the electricity delivery industry uses technologies that have more or less stayed the same for 100 years.

There's a common idiom that goes, “if it ain't broke don't fix it.” While the grid in the U.S. is hardly broken, it is beginning to deteriorate rapidly in some places, and it will need some serious repairs in order to meet the growing demand for electricity in general and distributed renewable electricity specifically.

“We need to see a very substantial transformation of the system,” says David Meyer, Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). “We're outgrowing it in many parts of the nation. It's certainly not the high-capacity, integrated and smart system that we need.”

The current grid is a stiff arrangement of one-way transmission lines, centralized generation facilities and aging substations. The recent emergence of large amounts of renewable electricity in markets around the country are creating new challenges for both the transmission and distribution sectors.

On the transmission side, the issue is whether there are enough lines to bring renewable energy onto the grid. Because many of the abundant renewable resources are far away from load centers, additional lines must be built to bring wind, solar and geothermal energies to market. If plans to construct lines are not on the table, developers will be hesitant to build large projects in these rural areas.

“This is what we call the 'chicken and egg' problem,” says Meyer. “It's difficult to develop new generation without being certain that the transmission capacity is there or will be there. No one wants to be out front taking an undue portion of the risk.”

As planners look to build more of those lines, they may have some emerging technologies to consider; particularly High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) and wires based on nanotechnology. HVDC transmission is certainly not a new concept — but it's gaining ground in the U.S. as renewable electricity will have to be transported further distances with higher efficiency in the future.

The other technology still in the research and development phase is the “armchair quantum wire,” made from tubes of carbon 100,000 times thinner than a human hair, called carbon nanotubes. When these nanotubes are made into a larger wire, they can conduct electricity far more efficiently and over far greater distances than the copper wires used today.

A leading researcher of carbon nanotubes, Dr. Wade Adams of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, says that these nanotube wires can theoretically conduct 100 million amps of current over thousands of miles without much loss in efficiency. Today's wires conduct around 2,000 amps of current over hundreds of miles, with about 6 to 8% of the electricity lost in the form of heat.

According to Adams, these armchair quantum wires will also be one sixth the weight of current wires and so strong that they won't need support mechanisms. That means new transmission lines would be less conspicuous, and perhaps not as controversial to communities and interest groups concerned about their impact on the landscape. “That enables us to carry, say, electrical power from vast solar farms in the desert to the Northeast, or maybe from wind farms in Montana or North Dakota down to Florida – and in fact, even from continent to continent,” says Adams.

Of course, transmission lines made from carbon nanotubes are about 10-15 years away from commercialization. But if brought to scale, these new lines could transform how the nation, and indeed the world, transmits large amounts of renewable electricity. The distribution sector, which is made up of facilities that lower voltage for ordinary consumption, faces a different set of issues. One of the biggest challenges for distribution is the emergence of smaller renewable energy generators, which can sometimes cause issues with metering and load flow. This is where the “smart” grid system comes in.

In order to better control electricity entering the grid at the local level, interactive control devices, monitoring networks, energy storage facilities and demand response systems will need to be implemented. As distributed generation becomes more widespread and local communities start generating their own power, the grid must adapt in order to handle a steady two-way flow of electricity. “You have to think much more distributed than centralized, you have to solve the problem of storing energy, and it has to be much more like an internet system than the current grid is today in order to be effective,” says Adams.

These upgrades of the T&D infrastructure won't be cheap and they won't happen quickly. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, a California-based energy think tank, the cost of upgrading the grid with “smart” technologies could be $100 billion. Some analysts have put the figure at around $150 billion. While utilities and other developers would pay for much of the upgrade, ratepayers and taxpayers would also be responsible for the bill.

However, the economic impact associated with a failed grid could rival the price of an upgrade. For example, the 2003 Northeast blackout caused an estimated $6 billion in direct and indirect economic losses over only a few days. ...

Massive Pre-Holiday Link Dump:

* SMH - CBD to be greener and taller
* The Age - Australia lags in green investment: report
* Technology Review - Gadgets to Spur Energy Conservation
* IEEE Spectrum - The Charge of the Ultra - Capacitors
* Technology Review - Improving Fuel Cells for Cars
* Salon - The Smart car is coming
* Technology Review - Carbon-Dioxide Baed Plastic Gets Funding
* AutoBlogGreen - Ricardo and QinetiQ partner on reducing cost of lithium ion batteries
* Renewable Energy Access - Oklahoma Utility Wants to Quadruple Wind Power Production
* Hudson Valley Solar Blog - Let’s just give up…
* Bacon's Rebellion - Solar May Be Hot, But Geothermal is Cooler
* ABC - Robots deployed to measure climate change
* Transition Culture - Follow-up to ‘The Big Melt’ challenges assumptions on Co2 targets
* The Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists - An inconvenient assessment
* The Oil Drum - Saudis officially happy with $100 oil
* Ricve University - Baker Institute study shows 'Big Five' oil companies limit exploration
* The Oil Drum - Wow. Peak Oil Is on The History Channel ("Megadisasters: Oil Apocalypse")
* The Age - Black Sea faces oil catastrophe
* Financial Times - Transcript of interview with Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister. Apparently peak oilers are all being overly pessimistic and promoting instability. Including the IEA. And he thinks Saudi can produce 18 million barrels a day.
* Hands Off Iraqi Oil - UK Speaking Tour
* SMH - ASIO becoming unaccountable: watchdog. The fallout from our oil war.
* Huffington Post - American Patriotism Crushed By Republican SUVs
* Singapore Peak Oil - LNG Will Not Provide Energy Security For Singapore
* Past Peak - Today's Bush Joke