Giving the grid power “controllability”
Both in Canada and the United States there’s increasing talk of adding “smarts” to the grid and investing in infrastructure modernization and expansion. Google’s and GE’s plan to collaborate on smart grid development is just the latest example. After two decades or more of underinvestment this is a good thing, because if we truly want to tap the full potential of renewables and maximize conservation and demand-management we’ll need a grid that is flexible and has controllability.
Currently, power on the grid generally flows like water — through the path of least resistance. But power electronics do exist that can direct where we want the power to go. These devices are generally called FACTs, or Flexible AC Transmission devices. They are important, because they allow us to use the capacity in the grid more efficiently and make it easier to manage the intermittency of renewables and a grid where distributed generation is growing.
A Canadian inventor has come up with a new kind of FACTs device that can be retrofitted to existing grid equipment, making this option much more economical for conservative transmission utilities. You can read a bit more about the device in my Clean Break column today, and check out the Web site for the device, which is called a Hybrid Power Flow Controller.
In the world of cleantech, transmission system technologies might not sound as sexy as thin-film solar or offshore wind, but faster development, testing and adoption of such devices is crucial if we hope to add significant quantities of renewable energy to the North American grid. It’s basically a realization of the “energy Web,” and while the concept has been discussed for many years, we’ve seen little movement in that direction. That needs to change.
Tags: grid, power electronics, transmission
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
September 22nd, 2008 at 6:15 pm
You would have thought the rolling blackouts in California, and the massive blackout in the Northeast in the last few years would have spurred a whole lot more attention to our energy transmission infrastructure- it seems like since then however, out of sight, out of mind…
I hope we have not waited too long as it is- our whole system needs an overhaul, but especially in the older, Northeastern US- we are one energy disaster away from a more deadly and costly one disaster. There are millions who would have a hard time surviving without electricity for very long, especially if a break-down occurs at the wrong time of the year.
September 29th, 2008 at 9:00 am
The Atlantic had a pretty good summary of some of the problems related to the grid/transmission aspect of wind energy:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/world-in-numbers
One thing I’ve really been impressed with in Ontario is the idea of selling conservation — those companies that broker conservation deals with companies and have the ability to shutdown equipment, and then sell packages of reduced demand to the government instead of power generation.
Maybe if we ever go through with that idea of providing Internet service over the power grid, every appliance in your house can be Internet-addressable and controllable from the power company office… giving them the ability, for example, to dim lights or shut off specific types of devices when demand is highest.
The Atlantic article correctly points out that any new grid initiatives are going to have a huge NIMBY problem — especially those that are expansive and go through hundreds of communities… and I don’t see a way around new grid construction to support renewable energy, given its distributed nature…?