Power grid is inefficient, expensive and vulnerable
Apr 22 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - George Pyle The Buffalo News,
N.Y.
If inventor Thomas A. Edison came back to life today, he might be amazed
by such inventions as the cell phone and the Internet.
"But," one of New York's premier experts on electric power noted
Wednesday, "if Thomas Edison were to come back to Earth today, he not
only could recognize the power grid, he probably could repair it."
And that, said Robert B. Catell, chairman of the New York Smart Grid
Consortium, is the problem.
A system so crucial to nearly every aspect of modern life has advanced
very little in more than a century, when Edison was one of its creators
and Western New York was the location of the first power grid,
connecting the hydroelectric plant in Niagara Falls with the street
trolley system in Buffalo.
What New York and the nation are now struggling with, Catell
said, is a power delivery network that is expensive, inefficient,
vulnerable to failure or sabotage and unable to bring the benefits of
new sustainable and nonpolluting energy sources to the homes, businesses
and public buildings that need them.
The answer to that is the so-far theoretical idea of a smart grid --
decentralized, computer-controlled, interactive, two-way system of power
distribution that will take full advantage of clean power sources and
information technology. It was the subject of discussion Wednesday as
academics, engineers, power company executives and attorneys gathered
for the latest seminar in the University at Buffalo-sponsored series
called "The Business of Energy" in the Buffalo Niagara Marriott,
Amherst.
"It will be one of the greatest engineering and technological
innovations of our time," said Catell, who is a former chairman of
National Grid and currently chairman of the Advanced Energy Research and
Technological Center at the State University at Stony Brook.
Without a smart grid, Catell said, the nation will not be able to take
full advantage of nonpolluting, renewable power sources, such as wind
and solar, and will never be able to provide enough outlets to plug in
the coming generation of all-electric autos.
The idea, he said, is not to enmesh the nation in a new network of
electric wires, but to make the wires we have more efficient and to
oversee them in a way that power can be shifted from areas of surplus to
areas of need, around bottlenecks, preventing outages before they
happen.
"It will be a formidable economic opportunity," Catell said.
Formidable, echoed William J. Miller, president of Maximum Control
Technologies, because of the many problems that must be solved,
technologies that must be invented or improved, regulations that must be
updated and decisions to be made. Even with millions in federal stimulus
dollars already handed out, he said, the puzzle is going to be hard to
piece together.
"Everything is on the table right now," Miller said. "The people
involved in this are being told by the president, "Make this happen. We
got you the money.' But it's still pretty complicated."
And an opportunity, said Nathan Rizzo, vice president of solar power
company Solar Liberty, because of the jobs to be created and money to be
made from smart grid technology and new energy sources.
One area of promise is that household solar power and/or wind power
systems can, at least part of the time, produce more juice than a home
can use. With a two-way electric meter installed, Rizzo said, a
homeowner can cut his energy costs twice -- once by buying less, twice
by selling his surplus back to the power utility.
That two-way connection to the power grid will also create some new
issues, said attorney (and former electrical engineer) Thomas E. Popek
of Hodgson Russ LLP, one of the event's sponsors.
The two-way metering and monitoring technology necessary to make the
smart grid smart enough to manage power use will have the capacity to
collect a lot of personal data on individual households, he said.
That data could include the distinct "energy signatures" of everything
from inefficient washing machines to life-support devices, providing
strangers a window on such information as the products the family might
want to buy or the times when the home is likely to be empty.
Popek said that consumers will have to be made aware of those aspects of
the new generation of power supplies and that there will have to be
rules for how such data can be collected, stored and shared.
gpyle@buffnews.com
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