Yes, Rachel, you can! What you want is a smart grid rich in distributed energy resources.

First, it is important to be clear that we have two power grids: a transmission grid, which consists of the big lines carrying power from distant generating stations, and a distribution grid, which carries power in the local area to homes, businesses, etc. Failures on the transmission grid, that’s T to us geeks, lead to the really big blackouts like that in the Northeast in August 2003. But most failures — around 90 percent — happen on the distribution, or D grid, and they are usually not well publicized.

Electric Power Research Institute estimates that, overall, blackouts and other power disturbances cost the U.S. economy in the range of $119-188 billion (see p. ES-3 [PDF].) By comparison U.S. power customers paid a total of $343.7 billion for electricity in 2007.

The shocking fact is that the costs of an aging and technologically backward power grid adds something like one-third to one-half to our annual electricity costs. Ghost Town Louisville is a poster child, but most power problems do not receive national publicity.

You would think that this level of costs would be driving the utility sector to invest in advanced technologies that would make the grid more resilient in the face of natural and human-caused disturbances. (Good thing Al Qaeda hasn’t hit a big substation or T line yet. We are highly vulnerable.) But you would be mistaken because the utility sector is probably the world’s worst mesh of capitalism and socialism.

Here’s how it works. The utility comes to the state utilities commission and states its expected costs. After the inevitable arguments, it then receives cost recovery though the rates — a guaranteed rate of return. The problem has been this system favors the status quo. Commissions are hesitant to approve new technologies, and utilities are hesitant to move into them. It’s a kind of comfortable, codependent relationship that promotes more of the same.

Another problem facing the utility sector, as in many industries, is an aging workforce. Working for a power utility has not exactly been the high tech glamor job attracting the best and brightest. So there are simply going to be less people to do the work — fewer linemen who can fix the problems. I can’t say that is what is happening now in the icy regions, but it sure is a proxy for what is going to happen if we don’t amp up emphasis on recruitment and job training. Since we need to rebuild the grid for efficient, clean operations, these are the green jobs.

That was a long set-up to get at your question, Rachel Maddow. Now here are some answers:

1. On today’s dumb grid, power outages must be physically discovered by line crews. This is not the Internet where problems are automatically detected and flows of information are automatically routed around trouble spots. The kind of sensor and automation technology that could do this is only slowly coming to the grid. Literally, this is about putting an automated communications and control backbone on top of the grid, which can detect problems and switch power to another route once a disruption is detected. This exists to some extent on T grids, but very little has been implemented on D grids.

2. Grids are going to get hit by weather. Lines are going to go down. But if you have a grid rich in distributed energy resources, it has much more ride-through capability. What are those resources?

Local power plants — This can consist of solar on roofs, combined heat and power plants at local institutions such as business parks or college campuses, or the existing local plants. Small-scale wind turbines that could mesh into urban and suburban environments are also on the way. Today’s power grid is essentially one-way. With smart communications and control systems, power from local sources can be more easily integrated into the grid, in a more Internet-like fashion. This is where we want to go on a standard basis, and this kind of energy network would be more likely to hold up under extreme conditions.

Microgrids — With those local power plants you might already have what is essentially a micro grid distributing power to a neighborhood, campus, business park, etc. So even if the bulk grid is out, your local grid is still on. Some people see the eventual smart grid as a confederation of microgrids linked by the bulk grid.

Plug-in vehicles running vehicle-to-grid (V2G) — It is generally not known that over 90 percent of potential U.S. energy generating capacity is under the hoods of vehicles. It takes a lot of energy to move around our steel cocoons. But vehicles stay parked generally around 90 percent of the time. As we move to plug-ins, that means we are going to have massive batteries parked in our garages capable of running our homes for several days. Many believe we will use that capacity to store electricity from variable resources like the sun and wind and feed it back into the grid with V2G. That will require smart vehicles connected to a smart grid. In any event, smart charging systems that coordinate plug-in charging with the grid are in development. This is an absolute necessity to make sure plug-ins are not charging during peak hours when it’s not absolutely necessary. The unintended consequence we want to avoid is plug-ins that drive up demand at peak hours, and thus increase emissions from fossil-fuel driven peaker plants.

Smart appliances — Also in development, and successfully tested in the Pacific Northwest, these home appliances have a built-in intelligence that provides them with grid awareness. When they detect a problem they can automatically cycle down, for instance the heating elements in your clothes dryer or water heater shut down for a few minutes, or your refrigerator lets the temperature go up. No food will be spoiled, and you probably will not notice that your dryer has extended its cycle for a few minutes or there is slightly less water to take a shower. But the effect of thousands or millions of small adjustments is to provide “shock absorbers” for the grid. That makes it easier for the grid to ride through problems.

Of course the green energy stimulus package has the laser-beam focus of everyone in the smart grid community. There is $11 billion in President Barack Obama’s package for smart grid. $10 billion is designated for T, and $1 billion will go to D. While I cannot argue with the need for more T to carry resources from our Persian Gulf of wind, running from Montana to Texas to the coasts, there are dangers that it will also transmit more coal-fired electricity. From a climate standpoint this is a perverse result. So we need some “green wires” restrictions on coal transmission. In addition, we need to make sure the D investments provide a migration path to the genuine two-way local D grid.

Druthers, I would have been happier with a more even balance between T and D in the package, but this is only a down-payment on the larger project of full-scale smart grid deployment. From the power disturbance cost figures cited above, it’s easy to argue that this will pay back rapidly and magnificently.

More on this at my new blog, New Energy Nexus.

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We should not rescue General Motors as we know it. But Congress could use the proposed bailout as an opportunity to begin building a new prosperity that can last. As part of any public assistance, GM should be required to help America reduce its oil dependence and tackle the climate challenge by producing the cars of the future.

Saving GM under any circumstances is a hard swallow.

This is the company whose Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said, “global warming is a total crock of sh*t.”

GM sent a posse of executives and lobbyists to Olympia to fight Washington’s Clean Car Act in 2006 — a law that will reduce climate pollution from new cars by 30 percent and save Washington consumers over $2 billion in fuel costs. (Governor Gregoire sent them packing and fought successfully to pass the law.)

The Clean Car Act was due to go into effect in the 2009 model year, so we should be getting the better cars now. But we’re not, because General Motors has more good lawyers than engineers.

In its endless court battles against Clean Cars, GM has mounted a vigorous “can’t do” case, casting doubt on its own ability to deliver quality cars that meet the standards. If you believe them — if they really can’t build good, clean cars — then “what’s good for GM” is what’s killing America.

Federal judge William Sessions scoffed at GM’s pessimism, finding it “improbable that an industry that prides itself on its modernity, flexibility and innovation will be unable to meet the requirements … especially with the range of technological possibilities and alternatives currently before it.”

The market wants efficient cars. The engineers can produce them; the law requires them. But GM’s lawyers and executives fight on for their right to commit commercial suicide and planetary ecocide, even as they descend on Congress, cup in hand.

So — come again — why should we dig deep to save a company that seems so resolutely determined to destroy itself, taking the economy and the planet down with it?

Congress cannot save GM and the jobs it provides by propping up its failed business model. The only way to save it is to overhaul it.

Bullitt Foundation President Denis Hayes nailed it: “In World War II … Detroit was ordered to stop making cars and start making tanks. Today, Detroit needs to be ordered to stop making civilian tanks and start making cars.” Hayes proposes that manufacturers be required to deliver cars that average 50 mpg by 2020, and 100 mpg by 2030. That should be a minimum condition of any bailout. Little tweaks won’t do it. We need — and to survive, the company needs — an automotive revolution.

We can’t revitalize the economy by resuscitating a gasping Hummosaurus. We have to build a new, more durable economy by investing in the infrastructure and industries that can sustain prosperity and save the planet.

The GM bailout is a crucial test: Will our heroic interventions to revitalize the economy merely prolong the demise of the old, bankrupt economic models? In response to this economic seizure, will we just lubricate the same obsolete machinery so it can hurtle more efficiently over the cliff? Or will we use this historic opportunity to begin building a new economy that actually works — delivering sustainable, broadly-shared prosperity and good jobs for the long haul?

The General Motors we know is doomed. But if a new GM can rise from the ashes and deliver “Green Mobility” — aggressively doubling fuel economy and doubling it again — GM would be worth saving.

As thunderstorms and tornadoes ripped through the nation’s capital last week, the U.S. Senate tied itself in a procedural knot, preventing a vote on the substance of the Climate Security Act — the first meaningful climate legislation to reach the Senate floor.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called it “the most important issue facing the world today.” But the minority stalled — insisting on a full reading of the nearly 500-page bill — while the storm raged outside. Once again, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” did nothing about the world’s biggest problem.

Twenty years after our preeminent climate scientist Jim Hansen warned Congress of the need for immediate action, this dilly-dallying is enough to make you scream.

But a closer look at the political tectonics at play gives cause for hope. Climate deniers and dawdlers are running out of places to hide. The election will be unkind to candidates who fail to offer real solutions to the fossil fuel dependence that is strangling the economy as aggressively as it is wrecking the climate. If the polls are right, pandering of the “gas-tax holiday” variety will be punished in November. And months ago, we narrowed the field of presidential contenders to those who support real climate action.

So in 2009 — after a historic election and with public demand for real climate action mounting — there’s every reason to believe that we can finally bring an end to the shame of this stubborn fact: The nation that leads the world in global warming pollution is the world’s biggest obstacle to climate solutions.

Even more encouraging, a much stronger bill is already emerging. Rep. Markey of Massachusetts is introducing the “iCAP” (Investing in Climate Action Policy) Act. Compared to the CSA, its emission reduction provisions are stronger, it protects consumers better, and it gives more assurance against development of coal plants that lack technology to safely dispose of climate pollution.

But the deck in Washington, D.C. is stacked against meaningful climate action — and that’ll be the case for a short while longer. While the obstacle-in-chief clears out this fall, a cleaner path forward for national climate policy is under construction. From the ashes of the Climate Security Act is rising a new determination to deliver a national climate policy that is stronger, simpler, and fairer. What does that mean?

Stronger. The following two statements are hard to appreciate simultaneously, but they are both true:

1. The CSA aimed to reduce climate pollution dramatically — about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 50-60 percent by 2050. With a growing population and economy, these cuts are huge.
2. It’s not enough. We need to reduce emissions at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050.

In political terms, this sounds unreasonable, if not impossible. But this is where political “reality” needs to yield to physical reality. These numbers are not interest group positions or negotiating platforms. They represent the minimum effort necessary to avert catastrophic climate disruption, in the exhaustively researched opinion of our best scientists. They are the bottom line — the objective reality, as Mr. Gore says, of our circumstances on the planet.

Let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t going to be easy. Huge, urgent, necessary transformations never are. But to sustain our determination, we need to aim for real solutions. Roosevelt could not have galvanized public will for entering WWII by saying we’ll defend against Japan but not Germany. If we’re going to do something big and bold and hard, we have to play to win.

And it’s not just the numbers that need to be stronger; it’s the mechanism. CSA was riddled with “offsets” and “off-ramps” and emission “borrowing” — complicated formulas that virtually guarantee failure to achieve what the bill advertised, let alone what science and justice demand. Can you imagine taking on fascism with all these hedges and constraints and equivocations? “We have nothing to fear but fear itself … but we’ll back off if it gets inconvenient.”

As a general rule, a bill as long as the CSA is a bill that’s shot full of holes. This brings us to the second key feature of a winning climate policy. It must be …

Simpler. The point of the CSA was to achieve specific emission reductions. But almost 500 pages later, that point was buried in an avalanche of qualifications and special interest pleadings. Some detail is necessary, of course, to ensure that the policy works as intended. But most of those words were there either to make provision for evading the intent of the policy, or to grease the skids by accommodating various interest groups.

To be fair, some of the bells and whistles made sense. But collectively, they undermined the purpose of the bill. Substantively, these complications sapped the essential economic power of the policy: the clear, unequivocal commitment to emission reduction that will drive accelerated private investment in real solutions. And politically, they crippled the bill. CSA was so compromised that even its supporters were ambivalent, and opponents could point to all the frills as evidence that it was just a costly special-interest bonanza. That message works, even when it’s only half-true.

The conventional way to pass a big, high stakes national policy is to load it up with a little something for everybody … everybody who has a lobbyist, that is. That may be the way to move sausage through the Congressional factory. But it isn’t the way to get a policy that does the job, or a policy that enjoys the broad, durable support of the American people. It’s easy to imagine how Congress could develop a climate policy in which all the lobbyists win, but people and the rest of creation lose. That just won’t do.

The simpler our national climate policy is, the easier it will be to achieve the third essential quality: It must be …

Fairer. Climate change itself is deeply unjust. The people who contribute the least to the problem are the people who suffer most from the impacts. These same people are least able to afford a climate policy that drives up fossil fuel prices without offering real alternatives. We should be sober about the politics: If all we do is restrict the supply and increase the price of fossil fuels and let people fend for themselves, we’ll never develop a working consensus for a national climate policy. And we certainly won’t sustain that consensus as long as we must.

A fair national climate policy will have three essential features:

1. Pollution allowances will be auctioned, not given away. Companies that pollute less will pay less, and the people — who own the sky — will be compensated for its use.
2. Auction proceeds will come back to the people, in some combination of direct payments and investments that speed and ease the transition to a clean energy future. I’ll come back to that combination in a minute.
3. We must invest — deeply and systematically — in a rapid clean energy revolution. A strong, simple emission reduction commitment will move enormous volumes of private investment toward solutions. But significant public investment is also necessary, particularly in areas like green jobs, transportation choices, transition and adaptation assistance for people and natural systems most at risk, and some research and development.

So, where should the public investment come from? Since auction revenue represents a big potential source of new public revenue that isn’t already captured, it’s a magnet. But Peter Barnes — the architect of “cap-and-dividend” — argues persuasively that the fair and politically strategic approach is to give the auction proceeds back to people as equal dividends. Rep. Markey’s new “iCAP” bill would give more than half of the auction revenues back in the form of tax credits and debit card transfers — focusing protection on consumers who can least afford fossil fuel price increases.

This is a good debate to have. But as we think about how to fund essential public investments, it’s worth remembering how much we already subsidize things that make the problem worse — coal, oil, and gas development, highway expansion, and the military and environmental costs we pay for our fossil fuel dependence. If we add new investment in solutions to our enormous, existing investments in making things worse, we’ll just be treading water in a river that’s plunging toward a falls. And we’ll be feeding the cynical message that may defeat climate policy altogether — that it’s just a big special-interest feeding frenzy that will squeeze consumers and hammer the poor without fixing the problem. A good, winning climate policy must beat that rap.

Playing the special interest game to a draw — directing public investment toward solutions while sustaining public investments that make the problem worse — isn’t going to get it done. We have to transform our priorities, not just add better ones. No matter how we resolve the auction revenue issue, we have to stop digging the hole deeper with public subsidies that prolong fossil fuel dependence.

Wherever the investments come from, they’re essential. Americans are ready — hungry — to turn away from the dead-end street of fossil fuel dependence … but toward what? We know where to begin: conservation, more transportation choices, cleaner cars and fuels, renewable energy, better urban design, good jobs in a green economy. We know how to do it in ways that expand economic opportunity. We know how to waste less and live better. But we have to make it real. We have to put our public and private money where our mouths are.

We have to build the future we intend — a sustainable, broadly-shared prosperity — not after we limit climate pollution, but simultaneously. Or else we’ll do neither.

But creating this new green energy ecosystem means linking what are today heavily “stovepiped” separate systems within buildings and between buildings and the grid. It also means expanding the definition of green buildings to include the digital smarts that connect diverse systems. The Green Intelligent Buildings Conference in Baltimore on April 2-3 focused on ways to cut through “stovepipes” and build those new linkages.

“We need to find ways to make the grid smarter, to make buildings smarter, and to have these smarts communicate with each other,” keynoter Jeffrey Harris of the Alliance to Save Energy told attendees. This will require new technologies and partnerships that cross traditional boundaries, said the ASE vice president for programs. “We need not just utilities but private industry to be involved.”

One key area where new partnerships are needed is within the building industry itself, between green builders and building intelligence providers.

“The sad truth is that many green buildings today are neither highly efficient nor particularly intelligent, and this is a missed opportunity,” wrote Paul Ehrlich of the Building Intelligence Group in an article previewing the conference. “We have the potential to deliver green intelligent buildings that are sustainable as well as able to deliver high-performance, low-energy usage.”

A green intelligent building “not only has a bike rack, green roof, and waterless urinals, but also the systems, controls, and automation needed to provide improved scheduling, coordination, optimization and usability,” Ehrlich wrote.

The conference on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor primarily drew representatives of the building automation industry, which has been installing increasingly capable Building Management Systems since the oil shocks of the 1970s spurred a new emphasis on efficiency. Ironically, as technologies improved through the ’80s and ’90s, declining energy prices reduced the drive to efficiency. Now those trends are sharply reversing, and technologies are reaching unprecedented capabilities while green building is booming.

“What we’re trying to figure out is how green building links with intelligence,” said J. Christopher Larry, director of energy engineering for the design firm Teng & Associates, in a presentation on the topic. He added, “Green building is growing so rapidly — the intelligent building industry wants to jump in.”

“A green building should not be solely green but should be green and intelligent,” Larry said. “Some LEED firms do not know about intelligent building systems.”

Indeed, today’s LEED Green Building standards do not directly credit building automation, though they do credit the efficiencies automation can provide. One problem is that building intelligence does not have a singular rating system. The Continental Automated Buildings Association trade group is promoting its Building IQ metric and working with the U.S. Green Building Council to update its LEED standards. Around June, a revised LEED is expected to provide more credit for building systems. CABA is also staging its own “Convergence of Green and Intelligent Buildings” research initiative.

Ed Merwin, field director for building software developer Tridium, noted in an emerging technologies session that green building, up to this point, has been primarily about materials. Now needed is technology to optimize building systems. “We have a lot of green buildings out there. We need to begin to build them up with technology.”

“I firmly believe smart buildings are green buildings,” said Jack McGowan, head of Energy Control Inc. and president of GridWise Architecture Council. GWAC is a U.S. Department of Energy effort aimed at developing protocols to link various piece of smart grid technologies, and it was one of the conference’s sponsors.

McGowan called out goals for significant growth in net zero energy buildings enshrined in the new Energy Independence and Security Act passed by Congress last year. Such buildings are energy generators as well as users, providing as much energy to the grid as they draw from it.

“The idea that buildings could give and take energy — that’s where the opportunity presents itself,” he said. With growth in net zero energy buildings, “We’re going to see more emphasis on intelligence in buildings” to measure and manage energy and revenue flows. “My whole vision is having the smart building meet the smart grid.“

McGowan made those comments in a session on demand response systems, which pay energy users to control grid power demand. At this moment, said McGowan, demand response is the best example of an effective smart grid business model. It could substantially reduce the $900 billion in grid investment needed over next 20 years by cutting need for costly peak power infrastructure, he maintained.

He briefly presented an early smart building-grid marriage taking place at the University of New Mexico, where his company and a series of partners have created a campus-wide network of smart buildings that manages loads in coordination with grid needs and stresses.

Matt Kastantin of EnerNOC, a company which aggregates demand response resources for grid operators, followed up McGowan. He provided solid evidence for the DR business case. Ten percent of infrastructure cost is spent to meet peak demand that occurs less than 1 percent of the time, he noted. So grid operators have good reason to reduce peaks. In 2007, customers of northeast U.S. transmission manager PJM Interconnect earned $107 million for reducing loads.

Kastantin noted several ways in which DR provides green benefits. Though some demand is shifted to other times, some simply is reduced. The peak power generation that is avoided generally comes from the most polluting plants. Perhaps most significantly, the systems that enable DR are a cornerstone of overall energy efficiency programs — they provide detailed energy use information that makes for smart energy decisions overall. For example, smart systems reveal when buildings are overventilated.

Peter Kelly-Detwiler, a Constellation Energy vice president who oversees the energy provider’s load control efforts, said the energy industry faces a “perfect storm” of energy issues, including a stressed grid, energy supply and price volatility, and the need to reduce climate-disrupting emissions. The industry faces huge difficulties building new power plants and transmission lines. Constellation is looking to DR to help meet those challenges, he said.

To this point, much demand response has been manual. A building manager gets a call and literally walks around turning off switches. Smart buildings will have digital systems that automate the process. In 2007, Constellation created the New Energy Alliance to push automated DR forward. It brings together equipment manufacturers, building automation firms, system integrators, and software businesses “to put the pieces together,” Kelly-Detwiler said, “… to integrate disparate controls … in a way it hasn’t happened before. Ultimately the integration of all these pieces sets the stage for us to work together.”

Another DR automation initiative was presented by Ed Koch, chief technology office of Akuacom, a building systems firm that has worked with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to create a Demand Response Automation Server. The DRAS employs web-based communications to link the grid with building facilities. LBNL has been working on automated DR since 2002, with sponsorship by California Energy Commission. The partners developed the DRAS, which was field-tested by PG&E in 2006 and now is in commercial use by all of California’s investor-owned utilities. Koch said the DRAS might be mandated for commercial construction in California by 2011.

The conference illuminated new potential for integrating systems within buildings themselves, where “stovepipes” segregate vital systems. Ron Poskevich of Lumisys cited a key example: though lighting represents one of the largest power demands, less than 6 percent of lighting controls are integrated with building energy systems. That is one reason the skyline is lit up at night after most workers have gone home.

“The big challenge is to get organizations to invest,” noted Robert Beverly, editor of Engineered Systems magazine, a conference sponsor.

Technology innovations are making investments more economically practical. They center on a combination of web-based protocols that integrate disparate control systems with wireless technologies that eliminate the need for costly re-wiring. For instance, Merwin presented a new Tridium software platform called Sedona that wirelessly configures different systems to be able to talk with one another. David Klee, a marketing lead for building intelligence heavyweight Johnson Controls, said the combination of wireless networks and convergence of building systems are two of the most profound trends in the field.

Graham Martin, founder of the EnOcean Alliance, detailed the alliance’s standard for wireless switches and sensors that is now becoming common in Europe. EnOcean gear harvests energy from sunlight, thermal changes, even the mechanical energy of a switch being flipped, so it avoids costly, messy batteries. He showed the 57-story Torre Espacia building in Madrid, Spain’s tallest and the tallest in the world to use EnOcean. Its 4,200 energy harvesting switches eliminate 20 miles of cable for 1.3 tons of copper.

Comprehensive in-building wireless has value propositions beyond energy, as Tommy Russo of Akridge showed in a presentation on innovative building technologies. Chief technology officer for the D.C. property developer and manager, he recalled how a friend had keeled over in an Akridge building with one of the first in-building wireless systems in the U.S. An emergency medical technician had arrived and was readying to take Russo’s friend to the hospital. Russo asked the EMT to use his cellular walkie-talkie to find out from the ambulance driver outside which hospital. Based on standard experience, the EMT said he could not communicate from the building garage cellular dead zone.

Russo said, Try anyway, and the astounded EMT reached his partner so Russo could find out where to go to be with his friend. Buildings having no dead zones, where everyone — including emergency services workers — is never cut off, is one important benefit of increasing building intelligence.

Smart buildings and the smart grid are two elements of the digital information revolution that are spreading tendrils toward one another. As they meet, they will provide huge benefits in terms of more efficient energy use, integration of on-site energy demand and generation with the grid, and better-functioning buildings that are safer and better places to work and live. The Green Intelligent Buildings Conference showed how these potentials are becoming an on-the-ground reality in many places. A new green energy ecosystem will be the result.

The military focuses much of its efforts on avoiding global petroleum disruptions. But it has not thought much about power grid disruptions that could affect its own bases, the Department of Defense (DOD) group says in a report authored by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger

The board says “physical or cyber sabotage — or even a simple capacity overload — could devastate U.S. military and homeland security installations and have a frightening ripple effect across the country, leaving everything from sewage systems to border security controls paralyzed for weeks, perhaps months,” ClimateWire reports ($ub. req’d, but free trial available).

Investigators noted: “A long-term major power outage would have significant consequences for both DOD and the nation … Unfortunately, the current architecture of the grid is vulnerable to even simple attacks.”

Military bases receive 99 percent of their power from outside the base, says the board. “Almost complete dependence of military installations on a fragile and vulnerable commercial power grid and other critical national infrastructure places critical military and homeland defense missions at an unacceptably high risk of extended disruption.” In other words, keeping those F-16s flying over D.C. and New York during the next terrorist attack could be difficult if power is out at the base and fuel pumps are down.

The article quotes Reid Detchon, executive director of energy and climate at the U.N. Foundation: “‘There’s an unacceptably high risk of outage from failure of the grid, and the grid is extremely vulnerable to a terrorist attack … The particularly alarming thing is that big electrical transformers are not assembly-line items,’ he added, noting that a massive outage or coordinated attack could shut down the economy for weeks.”

The answer, says Detchon, Chuck Yeager, Kurt Yeager and other grid experts quoted in the piece, is to make smart-grid deployment a major national priority. A smart grid able to mesh a wide array of distributed energy resources the way the Internet meshes many computers could hold up much better under attack — and keep juice flowing to the airbase fuel station.

Photo: Aidan M. Grey

Xcel previously announced its intention to stage the largest and most comprehensive deployment of smart grid technologies in the U.S. ever, and now it says it has targeted Boulder for a several-year effort that will cost up to $100 million. The aim at a comprehensive system is precisely what makes this a breakthrough.

Smart grid technologies exhibit the classic network effect. Deployed individually, some can still have valuable benefits, as the personal computer did before the internet. To maximize benefits, however, they must be put together. Because this requires an overall systems transformation, and because such changes generally pose all sorts of chicken-and-egg challenges, the smart grid has been slow to catch on in the U.S. (France and Italy, who have more centrally managed electrical systems, have managed to advance farther.)

Xcel’s effort deploy smart grid technologies throughout Boulder, a city of 100,000, promises to be a seminal demonstration of what the smart grid can do, documenting the benefits it can bring for customers and utilities. Here is a graphic depiction [PDF]. Xcel has pulled together an impressive consortium to develop Smart Grid City including Accenture, Current Group, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, and Ventyx.

In the notoriously innovation-averse electrical utility industry, a demonstration of success on a large scale is just what it could take to bust the smart grid loose. Industry executives are not the only ones who must be convinced. Xcel views Boulder as a pilot for smart grid deployment across its eight-state territory, and they will employ results to persuade utility regulators to allow investments in new technologies. Skeptical utility commissions have proven a significant obstacle in the past.

Unleashing the smart grid is about an energy revolution as profound as the information technology revolution of the last 30 years. Really, it is about the information revolution coming to energy — the smart grid adds a backbone of digital sensing, communications, and control. The technologies that enable this are diverse and complex, from smart meters and controls allowing buildings to adjust their power demand in response to the grid, to smart substations improving power regulation, to sensors providing granular information on grid operations.

This digital backbone will give the grid crucial capabilities it does not have today that are vital to reduce carbon emissions:

• To integrate an “internet” of smaller-scale, distributed energy resources such as solar panels, wind turbines, and combined heat and power units.
• To charge fleets of plug-in vehicles in ways that do not overstress grids and which create energy storage networks from parked plug-ins.
• To control power usage in order to reduce peak demands, thus eliminating typically dirty “peaker” plants plus power lines.
• To regulate power flow through the grid in ways that reduce the 5 to 10 percent line losses that characterize most power grids.

My only caveat at this point is the number of qualifiers in the press release — technologies “could” be deployed; “up to” $100 million could be spent. It will be important to track follow-through on the part of Xcel and its consortium of partners. But there is no doubt that this is a significant announcement with huge potential implications for general transformation of the power grid into a low-carbon energy network.

Xcel’s Smart Grid City page is here.

“Low Carbon Leader: States and Regions” (PDF) profiles 12 exemplars including California, which in 2006 enacted the first economy-wide cap on carbon emissions in the U.S., and Northeast states moving to implement the first U.S. carbon cap-and-trade system. The report notes that U.S. states, ranked individually among other nations, represent 34 of the world’s 75 leading global warming pollution sources. California ranks 12th.

Subnational governments have critical roles to play in carbon pollution reduction, both directly and in terms of the influence they can bring to bear on national governments, The Climate Group notes.

“In many parts of the world, state and regional governments control much of the carbon infrastructure, from energy to transport, and have powers to develop policies including implementing emissions trading schemes,” the report says.

“Sub-national governments, many of whom have globally significant economies in their own right, can also have a globally significant impact on climate change mitigation due to their unique position of influence on citizens and national goverments,” The Climate Group CEO Steve Howard noted.

Howard added, “Many of these measures will deliver not only environmental benefits but also financial benefits, both to the individual consumer and the wider economy.” “A further exciting development is that neighboring states have started to collaborate with one another, amplifying the emissions reductions that can be achieved.”

The report cited the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative under which Northeast states will put a carbon cap-and-trade system for power plants at the start of 2009, and the Western Climate Initiative. WCI is developing a cap-and-trade program among Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, British Columbia, and Manitoba. The Washington Climate Action and Green Jobs Bill before the 2008 Legislature prepares the state to enter into the WCI system.

“Low Carbon Leader” also features subnational initiatives in other nations that have not yet joined the global carbon framework, including China, India and Mexico.

• Guangdong, China’s richest province, has launched a campaign aimed at making it China’s most energy efficient province while saving 45 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions between 2005-10.
• Maharashtra, India’s industrial leader, has also launched an ambitious efficiency program aimed at saving 20,000 gigawatt-hours of energy.
• Mexico Distrito Federal, home to one of the world’s largest city-states, has instituted air quality measures that could save 2.2 mllion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year by 2010.

The report carries additional profiles including Tokyo; Victoria, Australia; Quebec province; Western Cape, South Africa; Scotland; and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

This article originally appeared in Climate Solutions Journal.

E.U. President Jose Manuel Barroso on Sunday said the European Commission is considering a charge on importers from nations without carbon limits. Companies from those countries may be required to buy carbon emissions allowances on exports into the E.U. This is intended to level the playing field with European companies who are already part of the European Emissions Trading System instituted to meet E.U. obligations under the Kyoto climate treaty.

Barroso said the Commission could “require importers to obtain allowances (emissions permits) alongside European competitors … There would be no point in pushing EU companies to cut emissions if the only result is that production and indeed pollution shifts to countries with no carbon disciplines at all.”

At the recent U.N. Climate Conference in Bali, Indonesia, the E.U. proposed internationally binding goals to reduce emissions to 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The U.S. refused to make that commitment.

Climate policy advocates have long maintained that a crucial reason to pass carbon limits at state and federal levels is to maintain U.S. economic competitiveness in a carbon-constrained world. Putting a price on carbon emissions sends a market signal that alerts companies to become more efficient and to invest in low-carbon products. The E.U. appears close to forcing U.S. companies to begin pating for carbon emissions, even in the absence of U.S. climate policy.

Washington state is the nation’s leading exporter per capita with export engines such as Boeing. Passage of the Washington Climate Action and Green Jobs Bill before the 2008 Legislature will prepare the state to enter a carbon cap-and-trade system being created by western states. That system could link up with similar systems at various stages of development in the Northeast and Midwest, as well as the E.U. Prospectively, exporters based in states that take part in trading systems might be advantaged over states without carbon limits. This adds to the case for passage of climate policy at the state level.

This article originally appeared in Climate Solutions Journal.

The Pacific Northwest GridWise Demonstration Project has just announced the results of their year-long test, which included two pieces:

• On the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, 112 homes, three onsite generation units and municipal water pumps were equipped with automated systems that allowed them to adjust grid power demand in response to price signals.
• Appliances embedded with microchips capable of automatically responding to grid power fluctuations were placed at 150 homes in Washington and Oregon.

The aim of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory-managed project was to document the ability of automated control systems to cut usage of the most costly power. Reducing demand can eliminate the need for peak power plants and delivery systems used only a relatively few hours of the year. Among the study’s findings:

• Average power bill savings among customers who participated in the Olympic test were 10 percent, and peak load reductions 15 percent.
• Power use reductions plus distributed generation reduced peak power distribution loads 50 percent for days at a time.
• These technologies have potential to lower peak power prices plus save $70 billion over 20 years by avoiding the need to build peaking plants and wires.
• If all appropriate appliances were equipped with the intelligence to respond to grid conditions, 20 percent of U.S. power demand could be adjusted, tremendously reducing the level of blackouts and brownouts.

BusinessWeek notes in its report on the tests that the smart grid “offers a huge business opportunity for the companies making sensors, control devices and software. IBM for one figures that the market for its software and other technology would be in the many millions of dollars, if the nation were to adopt the smart grid.”

One reason the Northwest was site for the test is that it already is a global smart-grid center. A number of companies based in the Northwest are already players in the game including Itron, Alerton, Microplanet, Schweitzer Labs, and Areva T&D. A 2003 report (PDF) found that Northwest companies then held $2 billion of a $15 billion global smart energy technology market.

The Olympic test provided customers with new electric meters, thermostats, and smart water heaters and dryers, as well as an Internet-based home gateway through which customers could set their own levels for comfort and cost savings.

“We’re talking about putting the power into the hands of the consumers, who can customize their energy use to save money and maximize comfort,” said PNNL GridWise Manager Rob Pratt. “They can check the financial implications of their decisions at any time, and adjust or override their settings whenever they choose.”

Besides economic benefits, demand response technologies also make for a cleaner grid. They reduce the need for peaker plant generation, generally the most polluting, as well as plants that must operate as a reserve for demand surges. They can also adjust demand to respond to fluctuations in production from renewable resources such as sun and wind. This is an alternative to back-up power plants now used to balance wind farms.

“Demand-response technologies can help accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable resources like wind power, making it more possible to effectively manage their integration into the power grid,” notes Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

PNNL based in Richland, Wash., is a national center for smart-grid research. It spawned GridWise, now a U.S. Department of Energy program aimed at accelerating the smart grid. On the Pacific Northwest demonstration PNNL teamed up with Bonneville Power Administration, which is also engaged in visionary efforts to test alternatives to traditional pole-and-wire power delivery. Utility partners were PacifiCorp, Portland General Electric, and Clallam PUD. Appliances were supplied by Whirlpool and software by IBM.

This post was originally published on Climate Solutions Journal.