This was the post I started writing a couple days ago until the first paragraph just metastasized to fill up the page. Once we have more than a few electric cars in town, then those cars will be potentially the biggest stress on the grid.
The peak stress on the power grid starts during the afternoon, during heat-of-the-day air conditioning and work, but it continues through the early evening. Offices are still turned on. Programmed houses are kicking in with their air conditioning in preparation for their owner’s arrival. Families are cooking dinner. The power grid is still working nearly as hard as it can.
Now let’s posit the electric cars coming home, drained from ...
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Electric Cars will not be useful for Demand-Response
If a performing electric car were to arrive today, with adequate batteries at reasonable cost, it could well push today’s non-transactive energy infrastructure over the edge. Usually I write about intelligent building agents; when I write about the power grid, it is to discuss transacted energy purchases between those agents and an intelligent transaction grid. Today, I am going for those transactions on that grid, but leaving out the building. But first, a little on the building with cars.
There a lot of hopeful scenarios in which peak shaving...
Read MoreKombikraftwerk - energy reliability through diversity
At the University of Kassel in Germany, researchers are assembling a reliable power grid from a number of unreliable components. Kombikraftwerk (Combined Power Plant) is a grid assembled from 36 biogas, wind, solar and hydropower plants in a distributed network. The project was designed as a demonstration project to prove that it is possible for the German power grid to be reliable even if based entirely on non-traditional power sources.
This is a demonstration (again) of the old principle that you can gain additional reliability and availability from ...
Grid-Interop was great!
in Smart Grid
It was a solid group of attendees, in tracks ranging from Building/Grid interactions, Enterprise/Grid Interactions, Architectures, Security, and probably several more.
This effort has really come a long way in the two years since the GridWise Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The effort has move from agreement on principles (then) to broad agreement on approaches, deep discussion of approaches. It was encouraging to have Matt Smith, Director of Duke Power’s Utility of the Future. All that good work that Cinergy was doing just keeps bubbling to the top. You might remember Cinergy as ...