Musings
If we are not careful, smart grids are in direct collision with the bill of rights. Some smart grid activities define or enable business practices for balancing energy supply and demand. There is a direct link between commonly accepted business practices and some definitions of our constitutional rights. With the best of intentions, we may be casually removing significant barriers to some of our most cherished freedoms...
Appliance manufacturers are moving beyond energy pain points to energy collisions. Utility-based energy standards are stuck on energy pain. Energy collisions can offer much more benefits to smart grids than can pain points; they can offer still more to the off-grid or near grid building. Collisions are part of a wide variety of autonomous energy behaviors we will see in the near future—if only the energy suppliers will stop blocking them...
I suspect most of my readers can just about remember light speed, the 100 foot barn, and the 110 foot log from learning about relativity. The barn had doors at each end, and one set would close the instant the other doors opened. The challenge was to transport the log through the barn. The answer had to do with light speed and collapsing space, so that as one got close enough to light speed, the log shortened, and it could fit through the barn. It was a simple enough calculation as to how fast one could go to make the log shrink how much. When each of us had completed the math, the professor sprang the surprise on us: "OK, what is happening from the perspective of a cockroach on the log?"
As I head off to the second smart grid interim roadmap workshop (whew – that’s a lot of pairs) I think back to one of the participants in the Business and Policy track that I led with Lynne Kiesling. Several members, bunched together in the participants, were from the Edison Electric Institute, the association of share holder owned utilities. They peppered us with detailed questions and countered transactive smart grid scenarios with valid objections. It was on the second day, however, that I recognized the thought behind many of their concerns. They feel that they are asked to subsidize pretend transactions...