Regen to test swarm logic for managing electric vehicle loads
My Clean Break column today revisits Toronto-based Regen Energy, which I first wrote about a couple of years ago. The company has developed a wireless device that uses “swarm logic” to manage the operation of large energy-consuming appliances. Some energy management systems are based on a central control model that tells individual devices when to turn on and off. Swarm logic, on the other hand, relies on these individual devices to work it out themselves. This collective negotiation process achieves a superior outcome, and much cheaper than using a complex command-control system. Hell, it works for bees, right?
Regen has since realized that its devices could be ideal as a way to manage the charging of electric cars. The fear utilities have is that a number of people in a neighbourhood will plug in their cars at the same time and overwhelm a transformer, causing a community to brown out. Affluent communities in California, where homeowners are most likely to adopt the first generation of electric cars, are particularly vulnerable. Regen is in talks with one California utility and several engineering colleges to test out its swarm logic devices as part of a pilot project, to see how good the devices are at managing EV charging. I look forward to seeing the results.
Tags: electric vehicles, Regen Energy, Swarm Logic
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.
July 12th, 2010 at 11:42 pm
Makes sense to me- while I have never heard it described as Swarm Logic, there are several different Networking Protocols tha allow peer devices to negotiate certain roles or communication paths, and this communication is ongoing to allow for changes in the Network. For security and redundancy, a decentralized mesh network would be a far better choice for a Smart Grid than a centralized one.
July 15th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Interesting technology. I hope it works because we don’t want to frighten people away from buying electric cars when there are already too many obstacles put in the place of people who want to go electric.