Articles by Patrick Mazza

Information is power

The day is sweltering, air conditioners are cranked up, and the power grid is straining to meet demand. Today is a "needle peak" day -- on the annual power demand chart, it shows up as a spike. Out of the year's 8,760 hours, needle peaks will occupy 200 hours or less. An extreme day like this is why the grid maintains roughly twice as much power generating and transmission capacity as it uses on an average day. Even though power plants and lines are idle most of the year, this costly overbuilding is needed to cover all contingencies. The grid is built to be there "just in case."

But what if another power resource were available that could dramatically reduce that peak demand, one that involved generating and transmitting no power at all? No, this isn't some weird "zero energy" thing. The paradoxical sounding resource I'm talking about is already in use. It's the demand, also known as the load, itself. The basic idea is that the grid can meet overall needs not only by supplying power, but by adjusting power use. The word for this is demand response, and it's a fundamental aspect of the smart grid.

Why the Smart Grid is important

It's the world's largest machine -- the interconnected network of power plants, transmission towers, substations, poles, and wires that make up the power grid. When you flip the switch you expect the juice to flow and don't have much reason to think about it, except during the occasional blackout. Power engineers and energy wonks might get passionate about the grid, but for most people it's just a background fact of life.

It's time to bring the grid into the foreground, because it positions at the exact center of the world's most crucial issue, global climate change. The power grid is the source of one-third of U.S. global warming emissions. Unless we clean it up we cannot avert severe climate change. The grid is also the key to electrifying transportation and making more effective use of heat generated for buildings and industry, source of the vast bulk of remaining emissions. The grid can be the ultimate climate saver.

But today's power grid cannot do it. A system built on central generating stations, little changed from the first power grids deployed in the late 1800s, lacks flexibility and smarts. We need a new grid capable of networking millions of distributed energy devices such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and smart appliances. We need an internet of energy that employs the latest in digital technologies. We need a Smart Grid.

Now's the time to make the big leap to clean energy

For the burgeoning clean energy industry, these are heady times. Having spent most of its years in uphill struggle, the industry has now climbed to the takeoff point. Wind and solar are the world’s fastest growing energy sources, their costs rapidly curving down toward competitiveness with fossil fuels. Fuel cells that provide clean electricity for […]