The Smart Grid

An excerpt from "Beautiful and Abundant" by Bryan Welch

Our current power grids are dumb. They are great examples of 20th-century technology, but they should get much better. We have the technology today to make our power grid more sustainable, cleaner, more robust and more reliable just by replacing old-fashioned metering with “smart-metering” and agreeing to pay enterprising power consumers for generating some of their own electricity.

Today, almost all our electricity is distributed from power plants through the power grid to customers. The electricity only flows one way. The utility generates the power, which flows through wires to homes and businesses. The homes and businesses use the power. The utility measures how much power its customers use, and sends us the bills.

The new, smarter grid allows every power customer to become a power generator as well as a power consumer. The customer and the utility are interconnected. “Smart meters” measure the power flowing both directions and the utility compensates the customers for their contributions to the power supply.

Where “net metering” is available, utilities measure the customer’s “net” power usage, that is, the amount the customer uses minus the amount the customer produces. If you can generate some of your own electricity with photovoltaics, wind or any other power source, the utility buys it from you and sells it to other customers nearby.

When electricity is distributed across long distances, some of the power is lost in the process. About 6 percent of the power generated in the United States is lost to transmission inefficiencies. If utilities empower individuals to produce their own power and pay them for it, the electricity is distributed more efficiently because it doesn’t have to travel as far. The utility customer gets compensated for the power, the utility gets a new, inexpensive power source and the grid becomes more reliable and efficient.

Our old-fashioned grid is unnecessarily vulnerable to weather and incompetence. When things go wrong, homes and businesses can go without power for days or weeks. On a hot afternoon in August 2003, a technician in Ohio forgot to restart a computer program after a routine procedure. Then maintenance problems shut down a nearby power plant and some power lines sagged into trees nearby in Walton Hills and Parma, Ohio. Within hours, 55 million people in the United States and Canada were without power.

Every year hundreds of thousands of North Americans experience temporary power outages due to weather. Scientists in 2005 estimated that power outages cost the United States about $80 billion a year, on average. The principal method for preventing outages is to produce surplus electricity so that peak demand doesn’t stress the system. That’s costly, both for the utility customers and for the environment, unless that electricity is being generated by utilities, individuals and businesses using clean, renewable energy sources. The utility can acquire that power at an attractive price, and it doesn’t have to plow billions of dollars into new generation facilities.

Our power grids are getting smarter. Most U.S. states now have laws that authorize net metering. Part of the grid used net metering in at least 35 states at the time of this writing. Unfortunately, implementation of net metering and smart meters has been relatively slow. Consumer demand may accelerate the process in the near future, and consumers will probably open new pricing negotiations with the utilities as well.

Imagine a power grid that includes millions of individual generators, photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, big coal plants, natural gas cogenerators, etc. interconnected with smart meters, paying on a net-metered basis and supporting each other. On the long days of midsummer when North American demand for electricity peaks, the photovoltaics are also generating more electricity. When overgrown trees interrupt the power supply from a coal plant in Ohio, wind power from Pennsylvania takes up some of the slack.

Photovoltaics and wind energy were pioneered by independent spirits who wanted to live “off the grid.” The most negative aspect of an off-the-grid system is the necessity of storing electricity in batteries, an expensive, toxic and inefficient technology. Interconnection with a smart grid allows individuals and businesses to benefit from generating their own power without the necessity of storing it in batteries. And our supply of electricity becomes more reliable and secure when the big industrial generators are supplemented by thousands-or millions-of small independent producers. In other words, we reduce risks when we don’t put all our eggs in one basket.

David Gelbaum is one of the country’s most influential advocates for smarter grids. He’s a successful investor and generous philanthropist whose attention has lately been trained on green technology and wilderness preservation. Since 2002 he’s invested about $500 million in about 40 different clean-technology companies, including renewable energy and smart-grid technology companies. At the same time he’s given almost as much money to environmental charities, including $250 million to the Wildlands Conservancy, a land trust he co-founded to preserve wilderness in California and to promote “distributed generation,” that is, decentralized small generators spread widely across the smart grid. He’s betting a lot of money on the success of the smart grid.

Unfortunately, utilities have hampered efforts to implement net metering on a large scale. Most states limit the amount of power an independent generator can sell to the grid, even where net metering is available. In most places, consumers are pushing their utilities and governments to liberate the utility grid, so it can get smarter.

It’s Beautiful. Or it can be so long as we pay attention. Fewer high-voltage transmission lines will be necessary. And fewer smokestacks.

It Creates Abundance. Obviously. A billion generators are better than one.

It’s Fair. On the Smart Grid, utilities and customers are partners. Everyone is a buyer. Everyone is a seller. The utilities control the economics, of course, and fair policies obviously have to be renegotiated.

It’s Contagious. Every utility grid in the world can be a smart grid. Presumably, with new technology, grids will only get smarter over time. Pretty soon, power customers just won’t put up with stupid grids.

Bryan Welch is known for his optimism, sense of humor and his commitment to empowering people to live their own versions of the good life. Welch runs Ogden Publications, publishers of Mother Earth News, Natural Home, Utne Reader and other media brands. “Beautiful and Abundant” sells for $25.95 and is available through MotherEarthNews.com or at (800) 234-3368.