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Aug. 9, 2004 – Chances are, the electric grid of the future will look a lot like the grid of today. But certainly it won’t behave the same as today’s grid, whether it undergoes a massive overhaul, incremental upgrades or is left unchanged.
Like the industries that comprise it, the grid is a dynamic and complex construct linking power generators, substations and transmission lines across continents.
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It’s antiquated, inefficient and dumb, hampered by half-century-old technologies that can’t communicate and a quagmire of regulatory and free enterprise pressures. It’s too valuable to ignore, and too expensive to replace.
“Electricity is the key fabric of the economy,” said Dan Rastler, a technical leader with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a nonprofit energy research consortium that promotes science and technology. “There’s a real need to get the industry as well as stakeholders on track.”
Deliberate attacks on grid infrastructure can cripple nations’ economies and undermine their stability. The grid became a frequent victim of war in Chechnya, where Chechen rebels and Russian troops have fought off and on since the mid-1990s.
In Iraq, guerrillas continue to attack power lines and towers in an effort to impede recovery and foster unrest. The grid is often cited as a vulnerable target for terrorism in the United States and in other developed nations, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
Garden-variety outages from storms and other causes sap $119 billion from the U.S. economy every year, according to an analysis by the EPRI. The nation lost between $4 billion and $10 billion when a blackout shut down parts of the East and Midwest last August.
Canada, which also went dark in the cascading outage, estimated that its gross domestic product declined 0.7 percent that month.
Most energy experts agree that making the grid less vulnerable to intentional and natural assaults, and more resilient when such assaults do occur, is critical. They see wholesale change as prohibitively expensive, risky and impractical.
Instead, they advocate improving the grid internally with technologies such as sensors linked to networks. They advocate reducing its burden externally through smart appliances and back-up energy sources.
“We’re not going to rip out the entire infrastructure,” said John Del Monaco, manager of emerging technologies and transfer at Public Service Electric & Gas (PSE&G) in New Jersey.
PSE&G initiated a program to use MEMS-based acoustic sensors to monitor transformers, and is developing similar technologies for cables and power lines. “You overlay on top of what you already have,” said Del Monaco.
New technologies aren’t enough on their own; they need to complement and be compatible with both the existing grid and the grid of the future, said T.J. Glauthier, president and chief executive of the Electricity Innovation Institute (E2I).
An affiliate of EPRI, E2I is charged with orchestrating the coordinated integration of next generation technologies. This year it offered $500,000 in grants to researchers developing nanotechnologies for electric power systems.
“What we need to really have is functionality, but we need to apply it in an evolutionary way,” Glauthier said. “We need to find companies that will be able to replace and upgrade where there is the most congestion and demand. We’re looking for ways to help ease that burden.”
Fixing the grid from within would likely require giving it nerves in the form of remote sensors that track its health, a network for collecting and distributing the data and a brain for interpreting and perhaps even acting on the information. But making such a “smart grid” would require engineers to design around high temperatures, strong electromagnetic forces and other difficult conditions.
About four years ago, PSE&G technology consultant Harry Roman and colleagues at the New Jersey Institute of Technology decided to tackle the first challenge: the nerves. They proposed developing a MEMS acoustic sensor to monitor transformers, using sound rather than electrical signals to inspect the innards of the transformer.
In theory, sensors would track the telltale sounds of sparks that are emitted when the insulating oil within the transformer wears down or becomes contaminated. Early detection could allow utilities to avoid power failures or costly fires.
Developing the sensor hardware proved to be the easier part of the equation, Roman said. Once the project was underway, he discovered that the oil’s temperature affected the sound of arcing. The team had to develop software that accounted for that relationship before it could get an accurate read on the transformer’s inner workings.
The sensors have progressed from lab-based tests to a mockup placed on a pole-mounted transformer, to this year’s challenge: several months of trials in a small oil tank.
Roman said “realistic implementation” is about two to four years away. In the meantime, he is developing similar sensors for gauging the motion of underground cables to detect mechanical stresses, and temperature sensors to monitor transmission lines.
Roman and Del Monaco emphasized that gathering data from sensors alone won’t make the grid more robust. Knowing how to analyze information to detect and then deflect problems would lead to improved reliability, they said.
“This is outage management,” Roman said. “Our whole philosophy has been to be more proactive. (Sept. 11) also prompted us to think about security. How do we use these microsensors for security?”
PSE&G may be ahead of the curve. Roger Anderson, an advocate of a Web-enabled smart grid, said the energy industry as a whole shies away from new technologies until it has little choice but to adapt. The 2001 terrorist attacks and last year’s massive outage jolted the industry, but didn’t prompt any revolutionary change.
“Late adaptive industries require crises,” said Anderson, a senior scholar who specializes in energy issues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “The later the adapter, the greater the crisis has to be.”
Stabilizing the grid as it slips toward a blackout — whether it was set off by a deliberate attack or by its own inner foibles — requires real-time analysis and instant response by a grid that is not only smart, but also conversant, with its many other parts.
Anderson sees the Internet, specialized software and improved hardware helping to build this genius grid in the next decade.
He also envisions a role, albeit a distant one, for nanotechnologies such as quantum wires. Quantum wires, or carbon nanotubes stacked into a long, cylindrical pattern, theoretically will carry electricity far more efficiently than today’s transmission wires. But not at today’s high costs, or with today’s limited supplies and capabilities.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state attack the problem from another angle. They created what they call GridWise, chips that can be installed into household appliances to monitor and assist the grid.
The chips combine PNNL’s expertise in microsystems with its mission to provide clean and energy-efficient technologies to the nation. The chips detect when the grid is becoming overloaded, for instance, when it is being taxed by air-conditioning demands on a hot and humid day.
The chips temporarily shut down air conditioners or other appliances until the grid has recovered. At most, temporary brownouts inconvenience homeowners. But similar outages at energy-reliant high-tech facilities such as computer chip-making plants can prove ruinous.
“The bottom line is, we can’t protect it (the grid) because it is so diverse,” said Robert Pratt, a staff scientist at PNNL and program manager for GridWise. “We need resiliency. We need the flexibility to make sure it doesn’t turn into a blackout.”
Pratt said the incentive for consumers would be in cost savings more than concerns about grid reliability. He envisions consumers installing GridWise into appliances, or buying appliances already wired with GridWise, and enrolling in utility programs that then give them cheaper rates.
Their individual energy conservation would be small, but “it’s the aggregate that makes it great,” Pratt said.
EPRI’s Rastler takes working outside the grid even further. The technical leader for its distributed energy resources program, he is looking at technologies such as stationary fuel cells that can provide alternative energy to consumers and thus ease the burden placed on the grid.
His program also explores the feasibility of renewables such as solar cells. Both will likely benefit from nanotechnologies being honed in companies and research labs.
“Several of the electric companies are interested in seeing whether these technologies can be part of the toolbox,” Rastler said. “There’s been a lot of hope, and a lot of over promise.”
Change is coming to the grid, even if its engineering remains unchanged, according to Anderson. An oceanographer for 20 years, he recognizes in the grid the same kind of dynamic interplay of forces that make complex systems like the climate so difficult to predict.
His tracking of blackouts in the U.S. over several decades shows a recent shift toward instability, with the frequency and magnitude of blackouts on the rise. The five-year trend serves as a warning that another multi-state meltdown like last August’s could occur unless the grid is healed.
“It scares us,” he said, “like the way the global warming people are scared.”