Message Board
SmartGrids - what do they have to offer?
Nazia Gadhia12/28/2011 4:13 AM EST
While approaching towards the end of this year, I have been reading quite a few articles on SmartGrids. Some of them mention naming Smart Grid as "Smart" as one of the top ten blunders in 2011 while many of them mentions Smart Grids as one of the top technologies in the future. However both of them are different.
Better visibility and control over the energy consumption is the requirement of both residents (energy consumers) as well as the utility companies (energy producers). In order to make this much more energy efficient and greener 2012, SmartGrid is one attempt of many. I would say this is still a kid and yet much work is to be done to make it SMART.
Take a look at a paper published around this here:
http://www.slideshare.net/NaziaG/smart-home-energy-management
Comments on this are most welcome!
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Nic_Mokhoff
12/31/2011 9:44 AM EST
Nazia Gadhia: I'm glad to see you picked up on my "blunder" of naming future grids 'smart'. I totally agree that it is a long process and that you will not even see when the grid has become intelligent, a true assessment of transparent technology progress. Your paper attests to that.
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EREBUS
1/2/2012 6:31 PM EST
The real blunder has been the acceptance of a power distribution grid that has a "huge" amount of lost energy from creation to use. The efficiency of the current implementation is abomidable. Everyone talks about finding new sources of energy. I say lets stop wasting what we have. We have plenty, we just throw it away as if it were valueless.
I does not take a "smart" grid, it just takes an efficient one.
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hm
1/7/2012 8:30 PM EST
Lots of work has been done for SMART Grid and more are in pipeline.
You should talk to person actively working in this field and he/she can brief you in more details.
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/DOE_SG_Book_Single_Pages%281%29.pdf
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EREBUS
1/9/2012 5:56 PM EST
Propaganda aside, I stand by my statement.
The document may sway politicians, but most engineers know that it is TESLA not EDISON who designed our current power grid 100 years ago.
Electric cars plugged into a coal based power system not only causes more pollution, but it is 90% less efficient than using natural gas or standard gasoline.
I do agree with the Danes, a distributed system of many power sources is much better than a few major power stations. The current interconnection was influenced more by politics than it was by engineering. That is how the entire east coast loses power at the same time.
The term "What it is" is not a sentance. The should have said "What is a Smart Grid". Clearly our government is also a product of a poor education in addition to having a poor understanding about electricity, its generation and its wasteful features.
Just my opinion.
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Duane Benson
1/13/2012 11:31 AM EST
Another grid blunder is the inability to get power out of some new generating stations. Take the Pacific Northwest and its wind farms. Huge wind farms are popping up all over central and Eastern Oregon. That's cool.
The problem is that the grid hasn't changed to accommodate the additional generating capacity. Government subsidies helped build the wind farms and now there are times where government subsidies pay to have those generators turned off because the grid can't carry all of the power during peak hydroelectric and wind generating times.
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