Design opportunities will emerge as North America, Europe, and Asia implement their smart grids. In searching for these opportunities, it’s helpful to dig deeply into the papers and talks at technical symposia to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges that have already been uncovered.
GOALS AND DRIVERS
The term “smart grid” refers to various efforts around the world to create national and trans-national electric-power networks consistent with 21st century technology. Goals are different in different places, though.
China has a blank slate and is building from the ground up, more or less. In contrast, the United States has a mixed infrastructure that dates back to the days of Edison and Steinmetz in urban areas, to Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in rural areas, and to relatively recent times in the suburban fringe. Despite good intentions and the best piecemeal efforts, much of it is old and brittle (see “Hey, The Lights Went Out!”).
Beyond blackout vulnerability, the demand for generating capacity keeps growing. But a variety of well intentioned special interests makes it next to impossible to site new power plants or run transmission lines.
Canada, with a population concentrated along the 49th parallel, is influenced by the U.S. Yet it has more relatively untapped natural resources that, for better or worse, might be traded in raw form or as electricity with its southern partner.
The European Union is in a similar situation to the U.S., but its post-WWII physical plant is newer. And even though they’re “greener” than the U.S., Europeans are more comfortable with nuclear power, thanks mostly to the French, who are selling surplus power to Italy and the United Kingdom.
Thus, the U.S. has two main goals. First, it needs to make the electricity supply more blackout-proof. Second, it intends to deal with the difficulty of siting new power plants and transmission lines through “load-leveling,” which means making the demands on the power-generation and distribution system more constant across the 24 hours of the day.
In practice, load leveling would mean more distributed generation, which could extend down to the fine-grain level of storing energy in electric car batteries at off-peak hours and recovering it at times of higher demand. However, it would more practically mean encouraging new industrial solar, wind, and fuel-cell capacity, with battery storage, to be used to augment fossil-fueled power when necessary.
This enhances the prospect of “microgrids.” In concept, these isolatable, small-scale power-generation systems can interface with the larger grid, but maintain themselves in the event of external failures.
Many smart grid initiatives take things down to the level of individual citizens, who will be incentivized to manage their demand by dynamically adjusted electricity rates that may be downloaded to their electric meters via RF or power-line communications (PLC), which is a slow frequency shift keying (FSK) technology that uses low-frequency carriers that can go through power transformers.
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