Markets and Innovation

What buildings have to say to smart grids

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The challenges of smart energy are well known. How can we as a society based on cheap plentiful always available energy, adapt to shortages, intermittent availability, and a continuing shortage of capacity to move energy from where we make it to where we want to use it. Local shortages and outages will become the norm, although local surpluses might create greater challenges. Most importantly, how can we adapt without abandoning the life-styles that we enjoy, and that we hope our grandchildren can as well.

The national Priority Action Plans (PAPs) for smart grids and smart energy aim to . . .

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Moving beyond Demand Response (DR) – Pricing Services

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Utilities and Regulatory commissions are obsessed with demand response (DR). All want to know how to get more of it. I could, with little effort, attend a national conference on DR every week. A large share of the standards priorities of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to support smart grids support DR. And yet, almost everyone recognizes that DR is a short-term solution. Plans are just now underway to move beyond DR.

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Underpinnings for standardizing Demand Response (DR)

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For decades, regulated electricity markets have struggled to deal with volatile energy markets providing to support un-caring customers. Customer’s real-time purchases, called load by the electricity industry, vary throughout the day, and more to the point, co-vary with external events. These issues are not limited to electricity. The “Super-Bowl flush”, which has reached the status of urban legend, names the stresses placed on urban waste water systems as external events synchronize demand.

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What is an internet of energy?

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In the political world, we often speak as if the smart grid will create and internet of energy. This sounds sexy, but it can be hard to noodle out what it means. I’m pretty sure that it does not mean that we will use smart meters to deliver porn. To find the internet of energy, we must acknowledge straight up the problems with our energy plans.

The internet was built around assumptions, scarcity of bandwidth and fragility of infrastructure, that clearly apply to today’s grid. Long distance transmission was expensive; email used to hop...

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