The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

the army’s tents in the Middle East are now covered with a thick layer of orange spray foam, which reduces the electricity needed for air-conditioning, heating, and ventilation by 40 to 75 percent.

“You give a marine two titanium balls in the desert, he’ll lose one and break the other.” If you are going to build a multipart, modular microgrid, to be assembled, disassembled, and cared for by soldiers, it needs to be hard to lose essential bits of it and even harder to break.

2.8–3.1 kW solar array • power management center • battery bank • 4 kW AC inverter • 4 kW backup generator

in-situ resource such as biomass conversion.” In other words, kitchen garbage and latrine sludge, burbling away in a specially designed tank about the size of a boxcar, generating biogas (farts and moonshine, or methane and ethanol) that can be siphoned off and used to run the generator and, not incidentally, power the cookstoves. They have called this the TGER (Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery) a nicely self-contained digestion machine that the army has spent three years and $850,000 developing.

One estimate is that 70 percent of the gasoline actually used in the field is for transporting other gasoline around.

mdr

a first world lifestyle and energy security are not, it turns out, exactly the same thing.

22,000-square-foot, 1,300-ton nickel-cadmium battery that was built outside Fairbanks in 2003.

though “flow” batteries—a grail many feel is worth questing for—seem

distribution networks.

investment in high-voltage transmission infrastructure has held steady at about 7 percent a year, while investment in low-voltage distribution networks, including smart meters, is below the necessary threshold for basic maintenance.

2013 Germany’s two largest utilities lost a collective $6 billion as many of that country’s corporate entities got off the grid altogether.

“as grid maintenance costs go up and the capital cost of renewable energy moves down, more customers will be encouraged to leave the grid. In turn that pushes grid costs even higher for the remaining customers, who then have even more incentive to become self-sufficient.”

Customers, homeowners as well as industrial concerns, want to use less power, want to make more power (and get paid for it), and want the grid to make these things possible.

The only ones that matter, however, are those capable of moving from sketch to prototype, from prototype to extant, and from extant to ubiquitous.

All of this is accomplished using about the same amount of daytime electricity as a ceiling fan.

15 percent a conversation about weird ideas that somebody made work once, someplace suspect, like Alberta.

while extant, is not yet ready for the mass market.

The easiest way to begin operationalizing “V2G” technologies is to do it with fleets, all of which park together in the evenings,

If we are talking about the big grid, electric cars for storage remain every bit as much a dream as room temperature fusion for power production, or the air as a conduit for the long-distance, wireless electricity transmission. The world would be a better place if all these things did work. But, for the moment they don’t, at least not at the scale, or according to the terms we want them to.

resiliently operational through a mix of microgrid technologies including solar panels, fuel cells, diesel generators, backup battery systems, and a small fleet of electric cars.

No more outlets, cords, or plugs would be nice. No more blackouts, short or long, would be great. So would a return to an earth with a stable climate, a planet that grows neither warmer nor colder because of our attachment to fossil fuels for making power.

we can’t just shut it off for a couple of years while we come up with something newer and better.

“rebuilding our entire airplane fleet, along with our runways and air traffic control system while the planes are all up in the air, filled with

passengers.”

it’s difficult for any one player in the giant tangle of our grid to have much comprehension about what motivates the others.

For example, in all my research into the grid I have never heard a utility customer referred to in the feminine.

Attentiveness to the details, and not just aggregate data, is critical to the effective reform of an infrastructure so essential to our lives.

How to deal with the combined interests of many different players—which does, and should, include global warming. How to deal with the legacy technology, which is to say the grid we’ve got. And how to deal with the fact that it’s made and run by humans, who are by their nature rather squirrelly and shortsighted.

a clear set of obligatory standards that twist the arms of even the most stubborn players toward interoperability.

but basic maintenance is still on the back of the utility. We, the users of electricity, pay those bills, until we don’t.

Comfortable enough that some already exist for our grid, and a solid subset of people inside the system are working out how to make these even better at integrating absolutely everything, and even some “nothings,” than they already are.

some sort of hub capable of translating across all the competing interests and integrating all the structural intransigencies will be essential to the success of an infrastructural upgrade that is national in scale.

the most boring, if heated, conversations behind the scenes focus on standardization.

Rooftop solar will not be counted.

way to allow utilities to make money off home solar systems,

First, all the electricity made, no matter who is making it. And second, all the electricity not used, no matter who is saving it.

Retrofitting is expensive in ways that don’t quite seem to pay off.

also around countable nothings.

smart meters can be linked to efficient buildings that automatically deploy grid-scale conservation.

Network enough of these power-savers into a flexible, smart piece of software, and you have your platform.

a negawatt will need a stable value.

“commitment to reduce demand” should “be compensated the same amount as an equivalent commitment by generators to increase supply.”

Regardless of what the court decides (as this book goes to press they are in deliberation),

We could pay them for gadgets perhaps, or a basic line fee per connected meter, or as consultants to newly aggregating towns and newly organizing microgrids, or as innovators in the still turgid waters of our energy future. The only thing we lose with this new version of our grid is our reliance on central stations.

The first is to integrate wireless charging into most flat things, like shelves, countertops, tables, and lamp bases.

that it doesn’t fill the air with electromagnetic radiation, as Tesla’s system did, but rather uses magnetic resonance, which essentially only allows the electricity sent to power a device specially “tuned” to receive it. This use of magnetic fields targeting appropriately chipped electronics helps these devices to sidestep known problems with wireless transmission via electric fields, which have a long range but poor aim, enveloping everything in a thick, invisible haze of electromagnetic radiation.

look into this

Given that we can already transmit power wirelessly across about three feet of thin air with 90 percent efficiency, in time we will.

And because it will have a microprocessor pushed into every crack it will be able to take anything we can throw at it—variable generation, distributed generation, small power, big power, negawatts, nanogrids, mobile storage, weird weather—and integrate these into a self-balancing, highly reliable system.

rotary phone