Markets and Innovation

Natural Gas and Perfect Power

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We are misusing natural gas in our power plants. Guided by strong emotions and the search for the quick fix, we are reducing the long term reliability and sustainability of our energy infrastructure. When well meant but bad decisions reduce the common good, we call it the tragedy of the commons. Technology and modern public interest groups let us recreate the tragedy of the commons on a larger scale.

Perfect Power is what Kurt Yeager and the Galvin Electricity Initiative call their version of the smart grid. Perfect Power assumes that the national power grid will not and cannot be made reliable enough for the digital world. Attempts to make the grid reliable cost a lot of money and waste a lot of power. Attempts to make the grid reliable interfere with the grid being the most efficient market place of energy possible, and able to accept innovation, diversity, and change. Perfect power reliability starts in the home and building...

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Packing Peanuts and Corn Ethanol

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It is hard to figure out the full cost of the government’s corn ethanol mania. Random observations during the holiday season suggest that they are still larger even than reported already. A full accounting, if it were possible, would sound a cautionary note as a new congress and a new administration consider how to stimulate new energy and E-Tech.

The most believable numbers suggest that the full production costs of corn ethanol use more oil-based energy then it replaces. These numbers are of course, in dispute as they include assumptions about fertilizer production and tractor driving and a twisted maze of hidden subsidies. Holiday packing peanuts are part of the picture....

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To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Watt

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There is a strong tug of war, not only in the buildings to grid (B2G) arena, but in all others, about whether GridWise is about controlling gizmos or about interactions between economic agents. One is paving interstates along the old cow-paths, and one is laying out a city. When you lay out a city, you never know what markets and neighborhoods will actually develop.

Those who have worked long in utilities or in building systems have a deep impulse toward the perfecting old models of control rather than laying out the market rules for transacted energy. Like a dog to his vomit...

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An Evolutionary Composite Services Framework for Energy

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Future energy systems must not only support interoperability on operational, e-commerce, and security levels, but they must do so against a background of innovation. New technologies will arrive from innovators who are not traditional energy participants; it must be easy for these innovators to introduce their products and easy to integrate these products into the intelligent grid.

New business models, especially support for distributed generation and the hybrid technologies such as the zero net energy building, will demand new interfaces. These business models require...

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