Demand Management: The Invisible Energy Resource  

On top of employing demand management solutions, companies should also look to create more energy efficient products, and government should look to stimulate - beyond simple mandates - industry doing this. behindthegreen.org is a site sponsored by The Technology CEO Council that seeks to create a dialogue between government and industry to implement new and more effective energy saving technologies in the products used by Americans everyday.

Why not instead accept there will be demand peaks. Why not make 50% of all future heavy trucks rail locomotives all hybrid electric / diesel(or Natural Gas) electric with an ability to generate power for utilities. Such vehicles can then be paged to pullin into a utility connection point to become sources of power to handle demand peaks.

Such a 6000HP loco is effectively a 4.5MW generator. In 2009 a major city is seeking network support for a 50 to 100MW shortfall. Such peaks happens only on 30 to 60 days a year for 3 to 5 hours. By subsidising these dual purpose vehicles unilities could avoid or defer expensive utility infrastructure spend.

This not a bad investment especially if these units could be made modular. Imagine the Diesel engine or gas turbine and generator all fitted on a single rail carriage which is hooked up to a regular electric locomotive.
During a demand peak there could be a two step resonse depending on the intensity.
1. the electric locomotive switches to power from the local source. This itself lowers demand by 4.5MW.
2. In a severe demand crisis. The train is pulled into a siding and power is fed back inro the grid via the loco catenary. This provides a further 4.5MW of embedded nework demand support.

Finally after the 60 day period the diesel/gas generator carriage is a free resourse that can be rented out to projects to derive additional utility.

The actual carbon footprint of this approach could be a lot smaller than knocking down and rebuilding utility infrastructure not to speak of the massive cost.

There are interesting variations to this idea. Perhaps will write another blog...

You are relying on depleting sources of energy that create carbon dioxide emissions and other forms of pollution.

As such, this isn't a workable long term solution.

The urban peak power demand is a very interesting problem.

The actual shortfall occurs only for 3 to 5 hrs a day on some days in peak summer due higher to air conditioning load. In a real scenario, this actual shortage is in the order of 50 to 100MW and is 0.5% to 1% of infrastucture capacity in a metroplitan area. The constraint is power line network and substation capacity to feed the power into the consuming area.

The desired solution is to avoid or defer the large expenditure and carbon footprint associated with upgrading infrastructure, if short term demand management or embeddded generation for network support can solve the problem.

My prev blog was how to address this short term power requirement by modifying existing transport infrastructure spend in rail locomotives and large trucks.

It may even be possible in the longer term to control the rising airconditioning energy demand which is about 45% to the total by a combination of gradually upgrading aircon technology, more environment friendly new building design and green building makeovers for current stock.

Its all about doing what needs to be done efficiently at the lowest possible carbon footprint. A lot of money is on offer for providing short term network support.