With all the talk about modern smart grids and the call for increased transmission to deliver new renewable energy to consumers, eager to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, little attention is given to how antiquated and inefficient long-distance transmission is.
via A different view on transmission lines – Sustainable Business Oregon.
We hear a lot about renewable energy these days, especially emerging technologies like wind and solar. Most of us appreciate the potential these technologies hold for our energy future, and we understand the challenges they can bring in terms of cost and reliability. Yet, we often overlook one of the most important challenges in bringing renewable energy online – how to actually get the energy generated from a windmill to a television or refrigerator miles away.
The New York Power Authority has scored $720,000 in federal stimulus money to test out new smart-grid technology on transmission lines in the Massena and Chateaugay areas.
The funds will pay for half of a $1.5 million demonstration project that could help the state authority better understand how adding wind power to the electric grid affects existing transmission infrastructure, according to NYPA officials.
via Watertown Daily Times | NYPA to receive $720,000 for smart-grid tests.
The term “smart grid” is bandied about regularly in energy news, but what is it, what does it entail?
The smart grid concept at its most basic is a variety of technologies employed on the existing power grid (including buildings connected to the grid like our homes), to make it more efficient, more reliable, and reduce the operating costs of utilities while potentially reducing electricity costs to customers including homeowners and businesses. In short, smart grid aims to make the power grid work better without hanging (or burying) new transmission lines and building ever more power plants: Smart grid makes do with what’s available, using a little bit of technical innovation.
Here’s a short menu of possibilities that can be included under the term “smart grid”:
— Through electronic connections to thermostats, or to the units themselves, power companies could be able to shut down customer-owned air conditioning systems briefly during peak demand to lessen the load on the grid and reduce the risk of blackouts or brownouts. These devices have been around for years;
— A thermostat smart grid connection, too (as above) can allow customers to adjust their thermostats to cut air conditioning use during periods of peak demand and thus save electricity and money. Not unlike setback thermostats, also available for years;
In April 2007, a helicopter landed in a backyard in Johnson Valley, California, a desert hamlet of 440 residents on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. “One of the neighbors went out and asked them what they were doing just a few hundred feet from his house,” Jim Harvey, a local landowner, recalls. “They said, ‘We’re the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and congratulations! You’re the lucky lottery winners of a brand new power line that’s going to come right through the middle of your town.’ ”
That power line is called Green Path North — an 85-mile-long high-voltage transmission wire from Los Angeles through public and private lands, connecting the city to potential geothermal and solar-thermal resources, with the whole shebang to be owned by the LADWP and paid for over the next decade by ratepayers. The cost: up to $1 billion just for the transmission line, plus untold billions for the not-yet-planned power plants themselves. Some 2,000 acres of desert would be sacrificed for a project that would, if it ever gets built, carry about 800 megawatts of renewable electricity — enough for 600,000 homes.
Green Path North is pretty typical of the renewables push in the United States: big, expensive, slow, and spectacularly uncertain. Twenty-eight states have pledged to shift their energy mix to at least 10% renewables, and at press time, Congress was considering a national target of 15% by 2020. But if many of us see this moment as a defining one, a key opportunity to reassess how we create and use energy across the country, the federal government seems content to leave the owners of the old energy world in charge of designing the new one. Big utilities are pushing hard to do what they do best — getting the government to subsidize construction of multi-billion-dollar, far-flung, supersize solar and wind farms covering millions of acres, all connected via outsize transmission lines. Nevada senator Harry Reid has introduced legislation to speed the way for a national “electric superhighway.” (Former Vice President Al Gore is another champion.) “We need to have an efficient way to take energy created in often remote areas and move it to where it is needed,” Reid said this spring on the Senate floor. “A cleaner, greener national transmission system — an electric superhighway — must be a top national priority.”
via Why the Microgrid Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Crisis | Fast Company.
China has embarked on a 10-year project to build a “smart grid” that will catapult power transmission into the digital age, securing electricity supplies and boosting energy conservation.
The program is expected to be a boon to companies that provide equipment and technology to the power industry.
“A smart grid is an inevitable choice for China to address issues in its power industry and develop a lower-carbon economy,” said Jiao Jian, an analyst at SYWG Research and Consulting, the research arm of Shenyin & Wangguo Securities, one of China’s largest brokerages.
Development of technical standards and other planning concepts will start this year, with the aim of completing the grid in 2020, according to Liu Zhenya, president of the State Grid Corp of China, the country’s dominant power transmission firm.
A smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology, such as two-way communications, advanced sensors and specialized computers that save energy, reduce costs and increase reliability.
With such a grid, utility companies can install advanced metering that assists commercial and residential customers in reducing peak-hour energy usage while at the same time allowing utilities to monitor usage to reduce outages.
The proposed new grid will ratchet up China’s investment in its power industry, which for years has suffered from underfunding, blackouts and, during the snow storms of 2008 led to the collapse of power lines in the south.
China currently operates about 1.18 million kilometers of mostly older transmission lines. The nation ran about 3 million gigawatt-hours of electricity through its grid in 2008, with 6.6 percent being lost during transmission. China’s total power demand is expected to more than double by 2020.
Most of the nation’s electricity is produced by coal-fired stations. China has said it wants to clean up the air by boosting the portion of energy that comes from renewable sources to 15 percent by 2020.
The proposed smart grid will be capable of handling alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power, more effectively. At present, grid operators have shied away from new energy sources because they are intermittent and require elaborate backup energy pools.
Industry analysts said they expect the government to unveil detailed development plans for smart grids next month.
In the United States, the Obama administration is pursuing a similar strategy as part of its economic stimulus package. It recently laid out plans to standardize domestic smart grid developments to ensure that equipment from different manufacturers works in harmony.
State Grid’s Liu, speaking at an industry conference in Beijing in May, didn’t say how much investment will be poured into China’s smart grid, but analysts are predicting it will be substantial.
China may need to spend up to 68 billion yuan (US$10 billion) annually on smart grids, Huang Shouhong, a power analyst at Essence Securities, wrote in a note. Investment on that scale would be positive for domestic makers of power transmission and transformation equipment and automation product manufacturers, including TEBA Co and XJ Electric Co, he said.
Global giants are also casting an eager eye on China’s smart grid development.
via China gets smart on power supply — Shanghai Daily | ???? — English Window to China New.
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