Smart Grid

We're primed to build ourselves a new, improved electricity grid. Obama mentioned this today in the same speech he mentioned our need to turn our economy around...back to the same debt-based consumer consumption economy?

I can't possibly imagine Mr. Obama has any idea what a smart grid is, because my co-workers and I, all electric provider professionals in bulk transmission, have no idea what a smart grid is.

A smart grid, apparently, will allow the seamless integration of millions of rooftop solar installations, all working in concert with the several hundred thousand wind generators, biomass, and wood pulp burning power plants, with several million smart consumers who will program their smart dishwashers and smart heat pumps to cycle on and off based on demand patterns and price signals and allow their millions of plug-in hybrid cars to power the grid when demand is high and absorb power when demand wanes. A smart grid will also switch power where it's needed, when it's needed, without bothersome and time intensive human interventions. A trillion bits of customer usage data will stream into the control center, all managed by a smart, trillion dollar WOPR, controlling your solar PV output, adjusting the pitch on your wind turbines, turning off and on your iPod charging stations...

Really.

Like we don't already route electricity where it's needed, when it's needed. Like we have integration issues with our forty seven grid-tied rooftop solar PV systems. Like we have these millions of Chevy volts in driveways across America. Like we have time of use metering installed in every house, all of which have installed appliances ready to turn on once the phantom price signals from their utilities reach a designated pricing point.

Such bullshit. You are made to believe that the grid is teetering on the edge of collapse, built in the 1920's, archaic, decrepit, rusting away and outdated.

First of all, the smartest grid in the world won't stop your tree (which you failed to keep properly trimmed) from shedding a branch in a windstorm, taking out your connection. The smartest grid in the world won't somehow be impervious to lightning strikes, flying squirrels, or failed insulators. Underground residential distribution cables, at times, fail. They simply fail. The notion that you will be 100% immune from widespread blackouts or localized service interruptions is completely flawed.

The notion that a lattice steel tower built in the nineteen sixties is outdated & archaic doesn't recognize the fact that these towers are probably only a fifth the way through their service life. They will still be standing when my great-grandchildren are invalids.

Smart grid is not a substitute for smart consumption...which costs almost nothing to implement. All it takes are smart people, smart consumers, something chronically in short supply in this nation. To get a sense of where the smart grid is going, look to the California ISO, charged with implementing market efficiencies into the electric supply. Tell me that the ISO has decreased costs to electricty consumers by developing such innovations as forward markets and real time nodal pricing. Tell me that the ISO hasn't increased the complexity of power delivery thirty seven-fold while reigning over market meltdowns, 200% rate increases for San Diegans and duplicating energy control functions the utilites already have.

Smart grid?