SOLAR TODAY Blog

NPR's Science Friday program today did a solid segment on the future of our electric transmission grid, with Daniel Kammen and Kurt Yeager. Kammen, director of Berkeley's renewable energy lab, is also an energy policy advisor to Barack Obama. Yeager is chair of the Galvin Electricity Intiative, and was a McCain advisor on energy policy. For this radio show, they spoke with one voice, agreeing that the term smart grid has come to mean everything from huge interstate high-voltage DC lines to digitized local self-healing networks for distributed power.

Said Yeager (my rough notes): Today, we're still using a dumb, slow electromechanical switching system. A smart grid can learn from experience and adapt accordingly. We can impose digital switching onto existing lines. We need to integrate supply and demand and give consumers control over their own role in the system. Many a state RPS isn't worth paper it's written on because today's grid can't handle intermittent power from renewable technologies.

Said Kammen: In addition, today's grid simply doesn't reach the remote locations where we generate utility-scale renewable power. And we need smart, instantaneous automatic controls to route around the surges and drops characteristic of intermittent sources.

Said Yeager: Other developed countries are moving ahead of us with digitized controls, and now measure electric outages in seconds or minutes per year, while the U.S. has become the blackout capital of the developed world. An intelligent system can detect a developing problem at speed of light and correct accordingly. You don't get cascading failures resulting from minor local problems. If a bulk power source goes down, a local system can isolate itself and rely on its own distributed sources. We need net-zero energy buildings, too, with PV on the roof, and power independence controlled by occupants of building. It would save a lot of money and use less energy.

Said Kammen: Building shouldn't be power sinks, but generators, competing to supply a local energy market baased on bids and auctions. We can build regional and municipal grids at low cost. Kenya has one built around a beer factory. Maybe we need big long distance DC lines with expensive on and off ramps, but we absolutely need better power electronics and high-speed switching. The $11 billion of stimulus funding slated for the renewable infrastructure is a good start - it can be used well to develop hardware. In time, a national smart grid might cost $200 billion to $400 billion or more.
Said Yeager: A new transmission infrastructure should cost as much as the Wall Street bailout, because it can be built incrementally on today's system. Today's system is regulated at the state level, and most states still reward their utilities for selling more electricity. There's no incentive for efficiency and reliability. The federal government has to step in as in as it did in building the interstate highway system. The societal benefit is so great that we need federal leadership. Today's grid costs over $1 trillion a year in lost jobs, lost productivity and lost competitiveness.

Said Kammen: Start with new ground rules. A number of states have decoupled utility profits from higher electricity sales. The utility must forecast its sales. If it then sells less, it gets paid more. We need regional experiments and demonstration projects.

Said Yeager: Boulder and Austin have promising test programs for smart grid development. At Illinois Institute of Technology we just launched the Perfect Power Microgrid, which can be a model for a national grid. But even if you build an interstate highway system for power, it will gridlock if it simply dumps power into local grids that remain the equivalent of dirt tracks. States rights are great, but not when they interfere with the general good.

Meanwhile, on Thursday a large group of utility and transmission companies, including the Midwest Independent System Operator, SERC Reliability Region, PJM Interconnection LLC, the Southwest Power Pool, the Mid-Continent Area Power Pool and the Tennessee Valley Authority, issued an alarmist report suggesting that infrastructure costs to provide 20% of Eastern power consumption from Midwest wind could cost $820 billion by 2024. The implication: We can't afford this. An article in the Wall Street Journal was picked up and widely distributed by Fox News.

Also see a story in The New York Times, pointing out that the Midwest transmission plan wouldn't put much of a dent in our carbon emissions. Northeastern utilities say they'd prefer to generate power from local renewables - solar and offshore wind - rather than pay for thousand-mile high-voltage DC lines plus massive rectifiers and inverters.