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Its 2009.  However, the technology used to power all of our 21st century devices is borne out of 19th century ideas and 20th century implementations.  The United States power grid is in need of an upgrade.  The Obama Administration has set aside money in the latest round of stimulus to spearhead an upgrade of the ailing power grid.  President Obama has even asked Congress to come up with legislation to spur development of new high capacity transmission lines and for the country to double its use of renewable sources of electricity.  Energy moguls like T. Boone Pickens have developed plans on how to cut the country’s dependence on foreign oil and take advantage of sources of energy here in the United States.  Even Google has stepped up and offered its own plan, called RE<C or Renewable Energy less than Coal.  Over the last few years California has stepped up adoption of renewable power as a percentage of its total usage.  In 2008 Governor Schwarzenegger even signed an executive order requiring California to obtain 33% of its energy from renewable sources.

Despite the efforts of T. Boone Pickens, Google, and the State of California the nation’s power grid won’t be able to handle the generation capacity and load requirements of the coming decades.  Today’s grids are susceptible to blackouts and cyberattacks.  The system that has worked for decades sees mostly a one-way flow of power.  Generation sites such as coal power plants and hydroelectric dams are linked to regional transmission grids.  These regional grids can span several states, such as that owned and operated by the Southern Company.  Power fed through the regional transmission grids find their way to distribution grids at the local levels.  This is the grid most people see, power lines running along the side of streets.  These local distribution grids, fed by substations linked to the regional transmission grids, are what provides power to homes, business parks, hospitals, schools, and industrial complexes.  So far, this has seemed to work for the United States.

However, now there are calls for upgrading these two grids.  Historically regional power companies have preferred to keep their networks of transmission grids separate from other grids, only allowing a few interconnections to sell or buy excess power to or from other grids.  It was this interconnection scheme that caused the Blackout of 2003 in the Northeastern United States.  A new national transmission grid, capable of moving vast amounts of power across the nation to the areas that need it, needs to be implemented.  Some are calling it the Unified Smart Grid.  It calls for long-distance high-voltage links between regional power grids.  Currently there are only two High Voltage Direct Current inter-ties between regional grids in the United States, The Pacific DC Intertie and Intermountain, both of which supply Los Angeles with up to 5GW of power from Oregon and Utah respectively.  This is a textbook example of using HVDC to transfer large amounts of power over distances.

The new Unified Smart Grid needs to take advantage of the high reliability and long-distance transmission efficiency of HVDC.  As part of the roll out of a national grid, three to five east-west HVDC lines need to be built across the country to transfer vast amounts of power in both directions to act as a stabilizing feature of the Unified Smart Grid.  In order to add further redundancy, north-south trunk lines should be installed on the HVDC grid so that if one east-west link section goes down the power can be shunted onto the remaining east-west corridors.  HVDC will also allow wind power from the Midwest Corridor and solar power from the Southwestern US to be distributed all over the country.

765kV Wind Grid

Another mid-range AC network should be built in order to offer mid-range links between regional transmission grids to allow the regional grids to import and export power to their immediate neighbors.  Allowing regions to transfer power would help to stabilize the regional grids, so blackouts like the one that struck the Northeast in 2003 won’t happen.  A review of established regional transmission grids should also be undertaken by their respective authorities.  Regional power companies should provide a report to a national body such as the Department of Energy when they are ready to accept a link to the national network.  Along the way, these regional companies should upgrade and repair their high-voltage transmission lines and install up-to-date monitoring devices and equipment that can help to stabilize power being delivered to distribution networks.

Local power companies such as city, county, and state EMCs should do a review on their distribution networks and upgrade facilities to allow for two-way transmission of power.  This will allow distributed generation via rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines.  Local EMCs also need to roll out a way for smart meters to interact with the local grid and provide realtime telemetry of distribution networks so transmission grids can anticipate load and begin shifting power from one location to another, or bring additional generation capacity online.

Everyone is familiar with the Internet.  Most people even know a brief history of the greatest network ever built.  In the late 1980s and especially in the 1990s, many Internet service providers ran local networks with a few links to other networks.  There was no Internet backbone that had the capacity to handle the onslaught of what would become the 21st century.  In order to continue providing excellent service local ISPs expanded their local networks, regional ISPs expanded their networks, and national telecommunications companies laid fiber optics to link everything together.  The United States electrical grid has no such national network in terms of both transmission of power and monitoring of usage and quality data.  While companies using both private and public funds extends the capabilities of transmission, those same companies need to expand the capabilities of the grid to react.  In order to react the grid will need advanced computing power including sensors and other types of monitoring equipment able to change parameters in the grid to provide the kind of clean stable power our 21st century devices will need.  High speed, high capacity fiber networks deployed on the same transmission towers would allow power companies to monitor and change parameters of the system in real time across large geographic areas.  The communications system would relay usage and quality data from neighborhoods full of smart meters to the local substation.  Billing hardware will parse this data for billing purposes and the quality and usage data would be forwarded into an aggregate of all distribution networks on a given transmission network.  As the data flows from individual power subscriber to the national network a lot of useful usage and quality data will help power companies expand and upgrade their networks to provide the best services.

U.S. Electric Power Industry Net Generation, 2003

Not only that, but transmission grid companies can sell excess bandwidth to telecommunication companies.  Not only would stability and reliability be increased, but those companies can make some money back from the upfront cost of deploying an almost entirely new transmission network, and consumers and businesses would benefit from both cleaner power and higher availability of broadband infrastructure.  Rural areas could connect to this fiber network for local broadband access that previously would have required telecommunications companies to run their own wiring networks.  Initiatives through various Federal departments have been pushing for universal broadband for years. With new FCC rules governing how the commission gathers its broadband usage and availability data, we’ll soon see just how under-served some parts of the country really are.  By working with power companies, telecom companies can roll out network infrastructure at much faster rates; they can continue their private network roll outs and easily connect onto a new public-private VLAN network run by the power companies.

Once a national transmission network has been established and tested, local and regional companies will be able to connect to and energize it using advanced generation techniques.  Some of these facilities are already being rolled out in smaller versions. Some of the newer technology include

• Wind and Solar farms provide emissions-free electricity generation but require diverse location to be effective overall.
• Geothermal generation plants can provide both electricity and heat and can be suited for industrial complexes in the north that require both.  They can generate more electricity than the attached factory requires and feed the grid.
• Plasma gasification technology can turn trash incinerators at landfills into power generators by vaporizing trash instead of burning it.  Byproducts of the process include heavy metals that can be recycled and aggregate that can be used to pave roads.  Gas emissions are much less than if trash is simply burned.
• Landfill methane combustion generates CO2, but using methane to generate power with the release of CO2 is less harmful to global warming that letting it breathe into the atmosphere.
• Upgrading Hydroelectric plants to newer generators would increase their efficiency
• New generations of nuclear power plants can provide adequate base load to the grid.

Newer more advanced generation facilities would be virtually plug-and-play into a regional transmission grid and its power generation capabilities could be realized by end users across the country.

As the new transmission grid is being built, and new power plants are coming online, homes and businesses all around the country need a few upgrades as well.  Luckily, these upgrades are optional for their owners and can happen at anytime.  Using the abundance of cheap computing power available to us today, every building can be equipped with smart technology to monitor the quality and usage of power being supplied either through the grid of through generating capabilities of equipment installed on site.  Smart meters installed on premises will record usage and allow billing at different rates throughout the day.  When connected with on site generation like solar panels, consumers will see their bills lowered when they are selling high rate power during peak times and only using grid power during low peak times such as during night time hours.  The City of Miami has started rolling out smart meters to all its customers.  GE and Cisco are helping to install metering and monitoring equipment.  This is one such model that can help provide an end-to-end solution to the smart grid, with power companies and municipalities working together with technology companies to build out local and regional monitoring networks.

However, a standard is needed.  Standards on monitoring equipment, meters, sensors, and software needs to be developed by the industry and adopted across the board.  The purpose of a unified smart grid is that all the parts work together in unison.  The only efficient way to do this is to create a standard whereby different software and hardware from many vendors will be able to talk to each other, similar to the BACnet protocol used in building automation technology.

In conclusion, in order to green the grid smartly, there needs to be defined divisions between projects. Using an analogy to the US Highway system

• A National “SuperGrid” needs to be constructed, similar to the US Interstate system
• Regional power companies need to upgrade, repair, and monitor their regional transmission grids, similar to US numbered highways.
• Local power companies need to upgrade, repair, and monitor their local distribution grids and all two-way transmission, similar to State routes.
• Local EMC companies need to allow two-way transmission of power for distributed generation capabilities, similar to surface streets in neighborhoods.
• Homes should voluntarily, or through a credit from their local EMC and power companies, upgrade to smart meters that work on their network, this represents the “last mile.”

Do you have any suggestions as to how the power grid can be upgraded to serve the 21st century?  Do you have an alternate view than what I’ve discussed here? If so, please feel free to leave a comment with your ideas, opinions, or own research into this topic.  As always, please subscribe to the RSS feed for updates from this site.