Smart Grid Blog

On August 14, 2003, the Northeastern and Midwestern United States were hit by the biggest blackout in the nation’s history. In total, approximately 55 million people lost power—all because of an overloaded power line in Ohio (it was a hot day) that made contact with some overgrown trees and shut down, creating a domino effect that ultimately shut down 100 power plants across neighboring regions. California faced similarly widespread blackouts in 2000 and 2001, triggered in part by an energy supply shortage.

via Battling Heat Waves by Making the Grid Smarter – Powering Down – GOOD.

Not able to adequately handle peak load demand this afternoon, Con Edison is — at the moment — trying to avoid a blackout by resorting to emergency measures.

The company has resorted to calling customers multiple times (automated calls were placed at 4:28 p.m. and again at 6:39 p.m.) asking customers to reduce demand (i.e., power consumption) by turning off all non-essential electrical appliances.

via A New York Emergency: Why Con Ed Needs Smart Grid Now : Greentech Media.

In the hour before the August 2003 Northeast Power Blackout, frontline control room operators battled an electronic storm of confusion and situational blindness, never seeing the cascading grid failure bearing down on them.

Michael Legatt, a graduate student and amateur ham radio operator in White Plains, N.Y., spent the aftermath of the blackout working with emergency responders who grappled with communications breakdowns across the New York area. It changed his life plan.

via Texas Makes a New ‘Map’ to Decipher the Grid’s Growing Complexities – NYTimes.com.

The first tangible evidence of the smart grid in Minnesota is coming this summer, and it looks like a small, black mailbox.

The box, called a “synchrophasor,” is a high-tech sensor that monitors the flow of electricity humming across hundreds of miles of highvoltage transmission lines.

By sending more information faster, the devices could help avoid catastrophes such as the blackout that left much of the Northeast in the dark in 2003, grid operators say.

When these “phasor measurement devices,” as they are called, are locked in place along transmission-line routes, an avalanche of data will arrive at a NASA-like control room in Carmel, Ind., a suburb of Indianapolis, and its backup on the edge of St. Paul’s Energy Park.

via Region gets first electric ‘smart grid’ this year – TwinCities.com.

Plugging in an all-electric car today may blow the fuse box in your home or even black out the neighborhood — and your utility has no way to anticipate or prevent it.

Utilities, car companies, “smart meter” startups and others are struggling to make sure that tomorrow is different.

via Electric cars crash into grid – San Francisco Business Times:.

To my mind this is the best overview of what constitutes the smart grid. The video was made by a really smart guy at Kepco, the South Korean firm, Korea Electric Power Corporation. It’s in English, so no need to worry about the language!

If you haven’t heard yet, a massive blackout Tuesday night plundered much of Brazil into darkness. The blackout began around 10:15 pm on Tuesday night and lasted in some areas till about 2:45 am Wednesday morning. The blackout also effected Paraguay but on a much smaller scale with power being restored after about 15 minutes. Officials initially blamed the blackout on a failure at the giant

via Brazilian blackout: A reason for the smart grid? « E N V I R O G Y.

On the afternoon of Thursday August 14, 2003 some 50+ million people in eight states and the province of Ontario lost power. Known as the Northeast Blackout of 2003, this event was the largest blackout in North American history. According to Scientific American, the blackout caused 11 deaths and cost approximately $6 billion.

The events that caused the blackout have been investigated and we’ve learned that the electrical power grid on which we depend for necessities like lights and heat is really quite fragile. The grid barely meets our current needs and, because it is based on 20th century technologies, our ability to manage it is limited.

As a response to what we learned from events like the Notheast Blackout of 2003 and as a key step toward energy independence, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains funding for the SmartGrid Investment Grant Program under the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. The SmartGrid is an update of the 20th century power grid with 21st century technology. Smart metering, reliable and secure transmission and clean energy generation are all part of the SmartGrid.

So how do we create the SmartGrid with updated 21st century technologies? As Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra remarked in his recent speech at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, while there’s a lot of work to be done, the government’s most appropriate level of influence is to support a collaborative approach to standards that will ensure we have a level playing field to deliver game changing innovation.

via Around the Corner.

The future of green electric energy is coming Tuesday to northwest Queens.

A $6 million pilot program featuring high-tech methods to streamline electricity flow will be unveiled by Consolidated Edison in neighborhoods hit by a massive blackout three summers ago.

The “smart grid” program includes home meters that inform consumers about their energy use and plugs for hybrid cars – innovations that the company hopes will lower costs and help prevent blackouts.

Components of the grid will be upgraded in the Long Island City network – a 3.8-square-mile area that also includes parts of Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside – helping control-room engineers identify and repair problems quickly.

About 1,500 customers will be introduced next month to smart meters – devices that will break down their juice consumption by appliance.

The utility will also install solar panels on the roof of LaGuardia Community College to test how green energy can be integrated into the city power-delivery system.

via Con Ed testing $6 million pilot ‘smart grid’ program in Queens neighborhoods hit by blackout.

In Boulder, Colo., a surge of electricity on the power grid can largely go unnoticed. The grid is monitored electronically, so that if there are any sudden rushes or fallen power lines, electricity is automatically rerouted from one part of the system to another. This pilot project sounds simple enough—maybe even a little obvious. But this new type of technology could have prevented the 2003 blackout that knocked out power to much of the Northeastern United States. On that August day, a few sagging power lines brushed against some trees, and the lines shut down. This set off a domino effect, as one part of the grid taxed another. The result? By the end of that humid evening, 50 million people in eight states and southeastern Canada were left without power.

At the time, energy experts and politicians called the blackout a wake-up call about the country’s antiquated power grid. Since then, major changes have been slow to take hold. The power grid has basically been the same for the better part of a century, says Ian Bowles, Massachusetts’ secretary of energy and environmental affairs. That is, until the smart grid. “You have to think of the smart grid as a cell phone, as opposed to your grandmother’s black rotary phone,” he says.

The “smart grid” is a catchall phrase for the power grid of the future, with various test projects underway in Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Hawaii. The idea is to make a system that will stop power surges from causing blackouts. It would create more energy-efficient power lines to carry electricity longer distances without losing voltage (current grids lose about 8 percent of power over distance). It would incorporate wind and solar energy into existing power grids. And it would let customers monitor the electricity they use in their homes, paying less for power consumed in off-hours.

Smart-grid plans have been on the drawing board for years, but the Obama administration has given the system, well, a jolt. The stimulus package includes $11 billion toward modernizing the electric grid, including the development of renewable energy. Within the next two to three years, cities such as Fort Collins, Colo., hope to use the stimulus money to build a “zero-energy district,” where one neighborhood generates as much power as it consumes.

First, green-energy experts say smart grids have to overcome two hurdles: funding and disparate state-by-state webs of utility companies, tech startups, and municipal governments, all vying to be the rainmakers of a greener power grid. “The smart-grid industry is not ready for an overall national-scale deployment,” Bowles says. “What the stimulus has done is capture the attention of all 50 states and provide 50 percent financing for significant projects.”

via Plugging Into the Future | Print Article | Newsweek.com.

The modernization of our electricity infrastructure–the so-called Smart Grid revolution–is underway, and not a moment too soon. As an interesting overview in a recent Wired issue made clear, the grid was cobbled together in ad hoc fashion over the last century, and is largely one-way, mechanical and dumb.

That’s why a storm in Ohio can plunge New York City into darkness; why, as energy guru Amory Lovins preaches, every electron saved at the point of use offsets the production of three to four times that many electrons at the source (e.g., a coal fired power plant); and why the Department of Homeland Security is so concerned about terrorists targeting our power infrastructure. In short, our archaic patchwork of a grid is vulnerable, inefficient and unreliable. It is quite damaging economically and environmentally.

Smart Grid–the application of computing and two way control to the electric infrastructure–is the solution, but it is a massive undertaking (the Obama administration has pledged upward of $40 billion as part of the stimulus package alone). History has demonstrated that infrastructural shifts of this sort tend to be massively inefficient. Our research suggests that a great deal of this inefficiency stems from the widespread inability of incumbents and start-ups alike to create the new business models required by new markets.

In short, grid modernization will yield immediate gains in control, efficiency and security–at a considerable cost. We’d like to see that cost offset by the advent of new business models that open up new avenues of growth.

via Preventing The Next Blackout – Forbes.com.