Smart Grid

A smart grid is more than smart. It can be entertaining too. Utilities look at their wires in the most utilitarian way. You see, Broadband Over Powerlines is a real technology that can give utilities much more information about and control over the grid.

Think of the simplest things. What if the utility stopped burning gasoline, tires and shoe leather to read your meter each month. Wouldn't it be simpler to install a chip in your electric meter that is the same one on your cell phone? All it has to do is call the billing office once per month, report the kilowatt-hours you've used and send you a bill. That's smart. Or . . . just send the data back over the power lines to the billing office.

During blackouts it is sometimes difficult for utilities to pinpoint every home without power. What if the cell phone in the meter had a battery backup and called the utility office to report it was not getting power. Simple.

But there is more that a smart grid can do. It can provide continuous feedback to the utility about power usage throughout the day and night. Possibly avoiding widespread blackouts during peak times by doing rotating load shedding. It can provide you with time of day pricing. You want to run the dishwasher or washing machine after 10:00 p.m.? You can have a discount.

But there's more. Broadband over power lines can provide entertainment. Cable, telephone and internet services can be brought in over power lines. Imagine, every electric plug in your home can be a broadband data port and provide you with many services competitively.

It would be nice to have a little competition for your entertainment dollar, rather than the monopolies that control them now. Wouldn't it?

SUSTAINABILITY

We hear this word from time to time, so I thought we would examine it further. Apples, they're sustainable. Oranges too. Crops in general, barring some catastrophic event, are sustainable. It means we can perpetuate something, virtually forever.

However, with respect to energy,we are not currently in sustainable mode. The United States and the rest of the world have vast supplies of fossil fuels. They will last hundreds of years, maybe more. But they're not sustainable. We cannot perpetuate them beyond their finite limits, notwithstanding their abundance.

So, what is sustainable? Certainly, hydroelectric power is sustainable, assuming it continues to rain in some catchment basin forever. Wind power is sustainable, presuming the wind will blow forever. This too is a good assumption. Will the wind blow when you most need it is still up in the air. Solar power is certainly sustainable, at least for the five billion years of sunlight we have left. It presumes we have sufficient materials to continue to build solar collectors and photovoltaic cells. This is also a good assumption for the foreseeable future. But the sun shines on its own terms.

That's supply side sustainability. And at the moment with current technology the sustainability of these wonderful resources will not provide sufficient energy to displace fossil fuels long into the future . . . and maybe never. I'm not any happier than anyone else about that, but realism when it comes to sustainability is no vice. Paraphrased and stolen from, possibly, Cicero.

Unfortunately, we don't have enough demand side sustainability. Maybe I should say that the other way around. We have too much demand side sustainability. As a society, we constantly, almost mindlessly, sustain our demand for energy. Think of it in terms of two statistics: population growth and consumptive growth. Nothing is static.

There are seven billion people on planet earth. In one hundred years, who knows, that could increase by fifty percent. I didn't look up the estimates. Doesn't matter. All of those people will use energy. They're not going to sacrifice. In terms of growth in consumption, just look at yourself and others around you. Be honest. Desktop? Laptop? Blackberry? Cell phone? More than one? Digital camera? LCD or Plasma TV? Shall I go on?

Let's take something simple, like the digital camera. Are you willing to go back to using 35 millimeter film in a single lens reflex camera ? I date myself. The SLR didn't require a charge and only needed a battery for the flash. And a little flat battery for the light meter that lasted for years. Is such a thing even available any more, except on Ebay?

People are not willing to go backwards, no matter how many of us vocalize for sustainability. But there is an energy source that is sustainable and possibly forever, as best one can determine that period of time. I refer to the nuclear fast breeder reactor. This reactor actually creates more fuel than it uses. It can perpetuate the current known stock of uranium by 100 fold. And if we use the vast amounts of uranium that are in the sea, it is as close to sustainability as one can get with the population and consumption growth we experience.

Is this easy? No. Does it require resolve? Indeed. Is it a more plausible goal with the cooperation of the world's governments? Of course. Is there risk of proliferation? There is. But there are risks in everything we do. And when it comes to energy, it's all dirty in one form or another. No matter what technology we use, it creates something to clean up after. The question is do we run after tens of billions of annual tons of pollutants in the atmosphere? Or do we deal with a football field's worth of nuclear spent fuel and reprocessing risk over a long period of time? Let me know?

The Invincible Ignorance of Government Officials

Ian Bowles, the secretary of energy and environmental affairs for the State of Massachusetts contributed an Op-Ed piece to the New York Times yesterday, March 6, 2009. After reading it, I had that sinking feeling in my stomach when I hear yet another government official get it wrong. Let’s tackle some major points one by one.

It’s admirable that President Obama would like to double renewable energy in three years. But it’s not likely. In three years, we’ll see. But let’s be realistic. There is just not enough renewable energy to double renewables (including hydroelectric power) from the current 7% of total energy consumed to 14% in that time period. Currently, coal contributes 22% of all energy consumed, mostly for electric power generation, and that represents 49% of all of the electricity generated in the United States. Are we really going to produce enough renewable energy in three years to essentially displace one third of the billion-plus tons of coal we burn each year? Natural gas represents 23%, petroleum 40% and nuclear power is 8% of all energy consumed. Biomass and hydroelectric power represent 89% of the 7% of renewables that we consume now. Government officials have to start reading their own government’s statistics produced by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) before they spout this blather. In 2030 the EIA estimates that non-hydroelectric renewable energy will account for about 8% of all the energy consumed in the U.S.

There is a lot of hot air coming out of Washington and state capitals about renewables but let’s be factual. Ian Bowles wants offshore wind but it has been no easy task for developers to build a wind project off the coast of Massachusetts in Nantucket Sound. Opposition from Senator Kennedy and others have delayed this project. And the Long Island wind project was buried because Long Islanders just didn’t want to look at wind mills that were 400 feet tall and had a 400 foot wing span. Moreover, Mr. Bowles and others like him promote hydroelectric plants, but try getting one built in this country. There is no more big hydro coming because of objections ranging from fish spawning, recreational use of rivers, water usage fights, silting and huge water impoundments that submerge vast amounts of real estate along with the towns and people displaced by the deluge. There were protests in the states over the Three Gorges project in China. Everyone wants renewable energy until you start using vast amounts of their land near to where they live.

Mr. Bowles doesn’t like large transmission lines. He says that transmission losses “gobbles up an estimated 2 percent to 3 percent of electricity nationally.” First, let’s get this straight: Transmission and Distribution losses gobble up as much as 9% of the electricity generated at the power plant. That’s just a fact and it has not prevented us from building transmission in the past and it will not do so in the future. I commend to Mr. Bowles the EIA’s Annual Energy Review 2007, page 221, footnote “f”. It’s right there in the fine print. We need big transmission for important reasons. People do not want to live near power plants, so they are more often than not in more remote areas. We have to transmit that power to the load center. Moreover, more transmission lines will de-bottleneck the very inadequate electric transmission system in the country and reduce the need for additional generation. That means less fuel burned, less pollutants in the air and less carbon dioxide. I also commend to Mr. Bowles the "National Electric Transmission Congestion Study" produced by the DOE in August 2006.

The final point I’ll address is cap and trade. This is tantamount to a tax on all of us because the extent to which we burn fossil fuels, all of which contain carbon to one extent or another, will not be reduced for decades. And they will only be reduced in any significant way if we have a comprehensive (non-political) energy policy with real teeth. EIA’s statistics for all energy use that I quoted above show us that 85% (coal: 22%, natural gas: 23%, petroleum: 40%) of all energy used comes from carbon-producing fossil fuel. The cap and trade tax is a pretext. It will not reduce carbon any time soon but it will burden all of us, especially the least capable among us of paying it, with more taxes that our central government can waste. It's just taxes gussied up to look like something else.

With respect to an energy policy with teeth, if I were president . . . .