In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged three billion dollars in U.S. stimulus funding to transform this old electric grid into a Smart Grid. Carl Imhoff is an electrical engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He told EarthSky that the U.S. electric grid hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years. And he spoke to us about the network of hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines that send electricity from power plants to consumers.
The revolution is underway now in getting broad communication sensing and controls pervasive throughout the entire grid system such that it’s a full two-way communication activity.
By that he means that your house will communicate with the electric company. For example, more consumers are seeing new meters, called smart meters, installed that allow instant communication between home and utility company.
A smart meter is just basically a two-way communication to the meter so that no one has to get in the truck who can read the meter. They can just read it from the central office. And if the consumer’s home loses power, they would be able to identify that immediately from the central office.
What’s more, Imhoff said, appliances used in one’s home are being developed to communicate remotely with the smart meter, so that, if you forget to turn off the heat or AC when you leave for work, the smart meter and appliances can be programmed to turn off and save money.
Jails do that right now. I don’t want someone to tell me when to turn off the light, wheather I am hot or cold or when to go to sleep.
The “smart grid” is an immensely expensive boondogle that GE has sold to criminal politicians. What it will do is cause higher costs and move more manufacturing overseas. There is no possible way to store and process the info from every home in the US and no reason to.
If we cannot get Yucca Mountain open, if we cannot get more nuclear power plants built and more coal and gas plants built, what we are going to see is dark. Dark and cold in the winter. Without electricity, it wil be a bit warm in summer. Fuel won’t be produced, transported or used. We take a giant leap back to a lifestyle similar to that of 1800 or before. Communications, medicine, food, transportation, all gone. Economy, in the toilet.
A person should use the energy he wishes to and can afford. Not what some bureaucrat or machine decides he can have. Adam Smith was right. Marxs was wrong. The environment is fine.
I invite you to listen to Carl Imhoff, in the 8-mintute interview, explain how a significant amount of energy can be saved from improving the efficiency of transmission through a ‘smart grid’ system. This kind of innovation, doing more with less, has long been recognized as a hallmark of American ingenuity.
Carl Imhoff: For every unit of electricity that we get we have to use three units of energy to get it, just because of the inefficiencies in combustion at the power plant and then getting it over the wires to where you can actually use it. So the quickest way for us to reduce energy use and to reduce energy imports is to improve the efficiency of our overall end-use activities. The smart grid gives us a very precise awareness of how we’re using energy and gives us a sense for best to avoid using it at times when it’s particularly expensive.
Carl Imhoff: For instance, the most expensive time for energy is during peak periods, when a lot of back up generators have to be brought on to meet that peak demand. Typically, those back-up generators are the least efficient of the generation fleet. You’ll always want to run your most efficient generators first and you save your least efficient generators for the few peak periods. So anything we can do to reduce or minimize the number of less efficient peak generators that we utilize, saves us both energy and it reduces our carbon footprint. Things like demand-response, which are enabled by smart meters which lets you sort of flatten out the peak on a distribution feeder move more of the energy use into the shoulder periods, and typically the generators in use during the shoulder periods have a much lower carbon footprint than the generators in the peak period. So that’s a simple example of how using energy smarter will help us deal with carbon issues and improve our efficiency.
The “smart grid” also allows the electric company to monitor usage at each smart meter, thus allowing the electric company at “their” desecration to turn down or turn off your electric. For example, in the summer if you have your air conditioning on and the electric company thinks it should not be on they can monitor your meter and simply provide you less power. Once again “1984″ is here, but few will complain, so the “smart grid” will happen.
Solar, we need to invest in being able to us to use as much of the “free” available energy as possible. There are many things that can be come to make homes and businesses more efficient – but then we are looking at a higher cost to build or “refit” exchange units in homes or businesses. I would love to have solar panels on my house or a generator powered by wind… but I can not afford to do that at this time even with the tax credits/refunds. There is an old says it takes money to make money – well it appears that it takes money to save money too. We have smart meters in my area, in fact the line that is off the main line has a smart meter on it and there is only two of us on the segment that come off of that line – it could be to monitor us or to see at which point that grid is effected by an outage. Thus being able to dispatch an electrical linesman crew to the correct location instead of “hunting or where the outage is or what may be the cause of some of the customer base being affected.
I do not care if they are monitoring my usage or not I soon hope to be able to sell power back to my neighbors via solar panels on the house – nothing to hide here.
There is no “free” energy. The cost of building and maintaining solar and wind generation facilities is such that the amount of power generated, when sold at market prices, is not sufficient to pay the interest and principle. They are money losers. Add to that, they are not depedable nor consistent. We cannot efficiently store electricity so we need power plants that will produce in the dark and in the doldrums.
I will repeat” THERE IS NO “FREE” ENERGY.
Benjamin, you are correct, but even further than that, the fact that areas suitable for wind and solar energy capture are generally geographically remote from population centers that need the power, the costs would be further exacerbated by the losses in stepping up and transporting that energy over a non-existant grid that will also cost money to build and maintain, …and couple in the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy…if you can’t count on it, you still have to maintain either nuclear or fossil fuel capability to carry virtually the entire load. Wind and solar with all these factors are a lot more expensive, which is why we are still burning gas, coal and oil…We’re not using them because we simply adore fossil fuels, we are using them because they are by far the most economical…
And we are not using nuclear because of the environmental laws and lawsuits the “green” lobby has thrown at them…
Ironic, Isn’t it? If carbon is so terribly bad, the only real workable solution is nuclear, but the “greenies” have bottled it up in the courts.
This is getting really close to what Alex Jones has been yelling about. He is at infowars.com
http://www.energyfieldnetwork.com – a new way to get your non-mainstream news
this just shows how advance we are nowadays! Well this will be another pride of the land if its completed. Way to go!
Good article about machine