Consumers Commandeer the Smart Grid

October 28, 2009

Well, okay, they didn't really commandeer it, and it's really more about smart metering than smart grid, but, this is an interesting, inexpensive offering that helps you see how you're using electricity. The EnergyDetective (TED) provides instant feedback on your electricity consumption, which can help you trim electric bills by ten to twenty percent. To put a TED in my house would be about $240, so a ten percent utility bill savings would mean the TED pays for itself within a year.

Car Batteries, Dreamers and a Voice of Reason

October 17, 2009

The dreamers are dreaming up the Holy Trinity, a vision where electric vehicles, smart buildings and the smart grid come together in a synergistic marriage that transforms the way we use energy; that lets us ditch the oil-powered car. It is an intoxicating view that offers to solve multiple problems, and create whole new worlds of human enterprise and purpose. But the dream is hampered by at least this issue: finding a cost effective, production scale energy storage solution to help power those electric vehicles. Current thinking focuses on the lithium ion battery.

John Peterson, an energy sector lawyer focused on "guiding small growth-oriented companies through the corporate finance process" offers a sensible, constructive critique that the electric vehicle actually derails our quest to end our oil dependency. 

Appliance Makers are the Good Guys

September 15, 2009

Toby Considine calls himself an "integrator of the un-integratable." He works as an infrastructure analyst, an in-house consulting resource to the Facilities Services group at the University of North Carolina and occasionally advises building owners and engineering companies on business strategies.

In a recent blog, Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances, he points out that appliance makers, "are starved for information," particularly when it comes to pricing energy in applicances that work in a smart grid. As Toby sees it, the appliance makers are the good guys and the energy suppliers the curmudgeon defenders of old world, fixed-price electricity. The energy suppliers need to give it up, and provide the price signal information the appliance makers crave.

iCar

September 03, 2009

The day of the car that does what you want is coming. The iCar if you will. Ford is developing 21 Escapes that do vehicle-to-grid communication, where the driver gets to program "when to recharge the vehicle, for how long and at what utility rate" when it is connected and recharging from the grid. 

Good.

Cars that give you the option to get there fast or get there efficiently, to charge quickly or cost effectively, to secure a parking spot in a crowded central business district? 

Better.

And then, to top it off: "Dr. Jasna Tomic with CALSTART estimates that the national grid would only need 7 percent additional capacity to off-peak charge 100 million electric vehicles.Those same vehicles could provide 70 percent of the national grid’s needed peak power."

Best.

Make driving better. Tackle big energy issues.

Photo: Georg Hoermann on flickr

Massive, Explosive ... Micro-Curtailment

July 06, 2009

This is a story about how you can curtail people's AC without them noticing, and the big opportunity this represents to do a little micro-curtailing.

We had an air conditioning problem in the pretty new building we'd just turned over (fried a variable frequency drive motor on the building's only air handling unit). The building occupants were sweating, we were sweating. 

We fixed the problem, but the following morning it was already 75 degrees in a couple of rooms (in Texas in June); temperatures were forecast above the century mark that afternoon. Our panicked owners were concerned that we hadn't really fixed the AC, and that those rooms would get into the upper seventies as they hosted a national theology conference. It was simply unacceptable that they'd have rooms with temperatures in the upper seventies.

Solar Endowment

June 10, 2009

Learning last week that an entire sports stadium in Taiwan is to be powered by solar made me dig up an concept from way back in 2003 (when renewables weren't really on the public radar yet) to put solar in a performing arts center project. The only occasionally used public facility is the perfect venue for the net plus facility (net plus being a building that exports power, whereas the zero energy building aims to not import power). Here's the bones of the concept:

Solar-Powered Sports Coliseum Gets Net A-Plus

May 31, 2009

Here's an idea for a power plant: the solar-powered sports coliseum. What if you skinned an entire stadium with solar such that it could satisfy its own ginormous appetite for power when filled with spectators, but when idle (which is usually often) its solar panels could still be at work, making and feeding electricity to the grid? Sports facility as power plant. A colossal idea not likely to be done anytime soon; a rich fantasy beyond the pale.

Smart Garage

May 17, 2009

Consider these rather large silos of development:

• the electrification of cars
• renewable energy 
• smart, interactive buildings that use less energy (and sometimes even produce energy--the trend towards net zero and net plus)
• a smart, interactive electrical grid

Get You A Good Energy Broker

April 23, 2009

How's it going to work with the Smart Grid, cars plugged in everywhere, and little mom and pop energy producers all over the grid, just tryin' to make a buck? There's a growing concern that it is a little more sinister than the affable scarecrow on the wires is singing it to us. An article in Business Week notes that consumers are worried that the Smart Grid, and the fluid pricing it implies, creates an opening for utilities to enrich themselves at the expense of the consumer: hey're leery of giving utilities the ability to change electricity prices on the fly, jacking rates up on hot summer days, for instance." Utilities, on the other hand, may be leery of giving up their warm, safe fixed rates, which give predictability to their business modeling and forecasting.

The Most Important Mistakes Are Made On the First Day

April 04, 2009

"The most important mistakes are made on the first day of the project." This durable piece of thinking from the world of the architect and builder underscores the importance of setting off in the right direction. The cost of being a few degrees off, of setting up on the wrong bet, can multiply painfully as a project progresses. 

We are at the whistle clean beginning of so many monumental projects: the Smart Grid, the recharge grid for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, an array of renewable options, electric rail, the mileage fee; none existed at any sort of scale, even in our imagination, at the turn of the century. Yet all are being conceived and planned and implemented at a torrid pace, right now. We are ripe for making our biggest mistakes... RIGHT NOW.

Take the vehicle recharge grid. Several companies are developing charging stations and the attendant infrastructure for cars (Better Place, Electricite de France, Portland General Electric). If they got distracted by their focus to emerge from the array of technical possibilities with the best solution, or to be victors in the marketplace, we might make the important mistake of overlooking what is best for broad implementation of a charging infrastructure for cars. 

For example, not standardizing the charging station interface (the plug and the receptacle) to let any car use any station, the world over. Different car makers, different grid operators, maybe dozens of plug and receptacle types. A confounding interoperability impediment avoided simply by clicking a few degrees right or left, by agreeing to collaborate around a standard.  From the missed opportunity to collaborate, a recharge grid with features so messy and costly that a decade and a million charging stations down the road it is dismissed by the fickle consumer, with no marketplace victors.

Hopefully, attitudes like Better Place founder Shai Agassi's will permeate these undertakings. (When Wired asked Shai whether he was worried that competitors might steal his ideas, he responded: "The mission is to end oil, not create a company.") From such visionary underpinnings, the ventures launched today may well be driven by minds geared to avoid the most important mistakes. 

The most important mistakes are made on the first day of the project.

We are on the first day of the project.

Photo: W.J. Cendak II showing just a little of the iron and muscle that follows the first day of the project, bringing up a tower crane.