Grid Edit Quotes

Remember that the first rule when editing a book is to DO NO HARM.

This is the way the power industry began in the days of Muncie, Indiana. Each town had one power plant, and there were no power lines between cities or towns. Moreover, technological developments are forcing a new look at this sort of design, nowadays referred to as microgrids. However, with current technologies and costs, microgrids are not yet cheaper than power from the large-scale grid. In other words, if you want an electric power supply that is extremely reliable—that is, very rarely has blackouts—at the lowest possible price, you need a fleet of large generators and a grid interconnecting them.

A generator tripping off is akin to a large water tower that had been filling one of the ponds suddenly stopping. To maintain the exact water level in that pond, and in all ponds, one of two things has to occur. Either you turn on another source of water exactly as large as the one you lost instantly (a “reserve generator”) or you immediately shut off downstream water users, whose total use at that moment equals the supply you’ve lost. Either one or a combination of these must happen to maintain immediate balance, although the consequences for the users are dramatically different.

A dumb electric meter adds up all of the kWh used over the course of a month regardless of when that power was made and how much it cost to make. Some homes use a lot of power during the expensive mid-day period, while others use most of their power at night. If those two homes used the same monthly total number of kWh, and they had a dumb meter, the power company has to charge them the same amount for monthly service because it doesn’t know when each house was using power. An executive I know likens this to weighing your grocery cart when you check out at the supermarket and charging you per pound of groceries in the cart, without prices for any of the specific items you chose to buy that day, whether it be caviar or pet food.

Oracle 12c Enterprise or Standard Edition – building on Oracle’s unique ability to deliver Grid Computing, 12c gives Oracle customers the agility to respond faster to changing business conditions, gain competitive advantage through technology innovation, and reduce costs.

If it is energy services that we really want, why not measure and regulate utilities in these units rather than kilowatt-hours? Suppose, for example, that instead of setting a maximum rate utilities could charge per kilowatt-hour we allowed them a maximum rate per lumen of light delivered, including the cost of the bulb and fixture along with its input power? Under this approach, if a more efficient light source came along, so that the bulb and input power were cheaper for the utility to provide together than the existing, less-efficient combination, the utility would automatically have the incentive to install the more efficient technology.

The reasons why industrial-scale CHP has not been used more widely in the United States are all related to regulatory and institutional hurdles. It can be difficult to make the necessary coordination arrangements with a large building that will accept and use a generator’s waste heat. It also requires navigating many siting, land use, and other rules to put generators into or near heat users. Arrangements with utilities are also a frequent issue. Because cogenerators displace utility sales, utilities don’t have an economic incentive to help them get established—yet utilities have to connect up and monitor the cogenerator and provide backup service when the cogenerator trips off (some cogenerators are “off the grid,” in which case there is no backup, but most are not).

The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time,” he continues. “So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.” There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today’s models use a grid of cells to map the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing power. “We’re trying to predict climate change twenty to thirty years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.

Energy efficiency is universally viewed as the best and cheapest means of reducing carbon emissions. But the power industry was designed to make and sell as much power as possible as cheaply as possible. Repurposing the industry to both sell and save electricity raises extremely difficult financial, regulatory, and managerial questions.

From the engineering standpoint, there are three vertical stages of production—generation, transmission, and distribution. Generators make the power in power plants, high-voltage lines transmit the power to substations in your neighborhood, and the small wires and equipment on the poles leading to your home or office are the distribution system.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has sole jurisdiction over pricing (rates) in the wholesale portion of the industry.

First, they could create a system of “open access” in which any power generator could use anyone else’s transmission system on a first-come, first-served basis to deliver power from a generator to a state-regulated distribution system. Second, the FERC started allowing some generators to make wholesale sales—sales only to other utilities, not actual end users—at deregulated rates. Once federal regulators enacted these key preconditions, advocates of deregulation could approach individual states. State legislatures could then vote to allow competition among deregulated retailers of power, or “retail choice,” as it became known. About half the states did just this, almost all in regions where retail rates were well above the national average.

In other words, sale of the commodity electricity (kilowatt-hours), formerly purchased only from your local utility, can now be purchased from any nonderegulated generator at whatever price the market has set. However, this power can only be delivered to you via the transmission grid and the lower-voltage local distribution system. Both of these remain fully regulated. Thus, even though the market sets the wholesale prices for power itself, the rates for delivering it over the transmission and distribution wires are set by federal and state regulators, respectively.