interesting-people message

Subject: [IP] The Energy Web

From: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
To: ip@v2.listbox.com
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:43:03 -0400

Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 12:19:58 +0100
From: Goncalo <goncalo@mail.eunet.pt>
Subject: For IP: The Energy Web
To: dave@farber.net

Hello.

After the recent blackout I believe this article will be a very
interesting reading.

Regards
Goncalo

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/juice.html

Issue 9.07 - Jul 2001

The Energy Web

The best minds in electricity R&D have a plan: Every node in the power
network of the future will be awake, responsive, adaptive, price-smart,
eco-sensitive, real-time, flexible, humming - and interconnected with
everything else.

By Steve Silberman

When Times Square flickered out below him, the pilot feared he was witnessing
a terrorist attack. Beneath the suddenly dark canyons of Manhattan, subway
trains lurched to a stop, stranding hundreds of thousands of rush-hour
commuters. To a satellite in orbit, it must have looked like a major
constellation was being snuffed out. First Toronto went black, then Rochester,
Boston, and finally New York City. In just 13 minutes, one of the crowning
achievements of industrial engineering - the computer-controlled power grid of
the 80,000-square-mile Canada-United States Eastern Interconnection area - was
toast. For the first time in decades, night held dominion over the cities of
the Northeast, which were now without traffic signals, television, airport
landing lights, elevators, and refrigeration.

You might say that the cascading blackout of November 9, 1965 - eventually
traced to a single overloaded relay in Ontario - was the dawn of the networked
era. The moment the lights went out, 30 million people woke up to the fact
that the apparently seamless scrim of modern life is stretched over an
intricate and vulnerable technological infrastructure that transcends national
borders.

Now, 36 years later, in the halls of the Electric Power Research Institute,
they've been calling the energy debacle in California the perfect storm.
Founded during the national period of soul-searching that followed the failure
of the grid in 1965, EPRI believes we still have not fully heard the message
of that massive blackout. The underlying lesson of the current crisis,
researchers at the institute believe, is that we need smarter methods of
electricity generation, transmission, and delivery - not just more power.
"This isn't about stringing more wires, or rallying around to make today's
technology work better," says EPRI's president, Kurt Yeager. "That's trying to
put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

The utilities' own privately funded think tank, and the sole independent
research organization employed by more than 1,000 power companies, EPRI was
the first industrywide R&D consortium in America. It's still one of the
largest in the world, representing utilities in 40 countries. EPRI's
constituency - ranging from old-guard, investor-owned monoliths like
Consolidated Edison of New York to upstarts like Mirant and Dynegy - generates
90 percent of the electricity used in the United States.

The Bush-Cheney administration's declarations about beefing up our energy
networks with 21st-century technology rang familiar at EPRI, because the
institute has been laying the scientific groundwork for this technology for
decades. Though EPRI's oldest members stand to gain from an energy policy that
favors traditional means of boosting supply (such as building more fossil-fuel
plants, extracting more oil, and reviving the domestic nuclear power
industry), the institute's spokespeople share the conviction held by many
researchers in our national energy laboratories that the administration's
emphasis on supply-side solutions could be disastrous, if the budgets and
legislation that follow undercut the search for alternative means of
producing, distributing, and using energy.

National debate over the merits of such short-term nostrums as drilling in
national wilderness areas, EPRI believes, is a distraction from what's really
at stake: our ability to implement a practical blueprint for a radically new
conception of the energy grid.

In recent years, a series of technological breakthroughs - and, more
important, a critical mass of scientific ideas - has begun to coalesce around
a new model for an energy system that would better serve the needs of the near
future, while enabling power producers as well as consumers to lessen their
impact on the environment in the long term. Both privately and publicly, many
at the institute express concern that the policy thrust of the current
administration will lock out the most promising set of innovations to emerge
in the energy community since the creation of the existing grid in the first
half of the 20th century. The end result, they fear, may be to freeze us into
high-emissions power pathways for decades to come.

"We've seen the words that they're getting the message," Kurt Yeager says.
"Now let's hear the music." In fact, at the budgetary level, the
administration has been singing a much different tune - systematically
slashing the programs that produced the technological developments they're
now touting to sell their policy.

"The current regime in Washington believes that the tree-huggers can go be
virtuous and make sacrifices while real men go out and build more pipelines,"
EPRI spokesperson Brent Barker observes. "They think new technology appears
by magic. The problem is that the existing technology puts us on a collision
course with the environment. Their strategy is to keep us on that course."

Like the infrastructure itself, the failure of support for long-range R&D
transcends national borders. Ironically, as the global economy becomes
increasingly dependent on the digital networks made possible by electricity,
public funding worldwide for tapping new, cleaner power sources and evolving
our infrastructure is tanking. The US spent one-third less on energy R&D in
1995 than it did in 1985. Germany, Italy, and the UK spent two-thirds less.
Venture capital and private investment in energy research almost never address
systemwide issues. The grid itself is falling through the cracks.

The smarter energy network of the future, EPRI believes, will incorporate a
diversified pool of resources located closer to the consumer, pumping out
low-or zero-emissions power in backyards, driveways, downscaled local power
stations, and even in automobiles, while giving electricity users the option
to become energy vendors. The front end of this new system will be managed by
third-party "virtual utilities," which will bundle electricity, gas, Internet
access, broadband entertainment, and other customized energy services. (This
vision is reminiscent of Edison's original ambition for the industry, which
was not to sell lightbulbs, but to create a network of technologies and
services that provided illumination.)

...

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