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Not so Smart Grids, doomed to fail?

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Command and control

Photo credit Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan in Iraq

I was invited by James McClelland and Maureen Coveney to participate in a panel at SAP’s Sapphire conference earlier this year discussing Smart Grids.

One of the key points I made was that utilities are not used to having to deal with customers. The only real interactions utilities have with customers are 1) sending out bills and 2) when the power goes and customers ring up to complain. It is highly unusual to have a utility company poll its customers when rolling out a new product, for example (for that matter, when was the last time your utility rolled out a new product?).

With the requirement to roll-out smart grids and the increasing empowerment of customers using web 2.0 technologies, for example, utilities are now going to have to learn to listen to their customers very quickly. Any roll-out of demand response programs which doesn’t take customer concerns into account is almost certain to run into serious difficulties. I have heard several utilities talk about using smart grids to come into customers houses and turn down their air conditioning at times of peak demand. Wrong! This kind of message will not sell easily.

A recent example of a not-so-smart grid was highlighted by 3News in New Zealand recently when they reported that the smart grids being rolled out there were ones where:

the benefits from smart meters almost entirely accrue to the retailer… Consumers will end up paying for meters that provide them with minimal benefits

Utilities are going to have to radically change how they deal with their customers, and quickly or they risk having spectacular failures when they launch their smart grid initiatives!

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July 20th GreenMonk Energy and Sustainability show

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Here is the chatstream from today’s GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability show:
03:31 Tom Raftery: Audio & video check – can you see/hear me?
03:31 MikeTheBee: Wainting to compare Tom’s resolution 🙂
03:32 SukiFuller: Howdy All.
03:33 CosmoCat: Hi
03:33 SukiFuller: Packing break for you Tom!
03:33 MikeTheBee: Hi Suki, U got a pic of yet?
03:33 Joe Garde: Hi Tom
03:33 Tom Raftery: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/tiny-nation-at-war-with-rising-tide-51207557.html
03:34 Joe Garde: .tv
03:34 liveireland: ok u have our audience
03:34 MikeTheBee: Ah found TOm back on Ustream
03:35 SukiFuller: @mikethebee pic?
03:35 Tom Raftery: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/weather/07/20/pakistan.rainfall/index.html?iref=topnews
03:35 MikeTheBee: I was on the Livestream Player form 10mins ago Hah
03:36 MikeTheBee: It didn’t change automaticalyy
03:36 Tom Raftery: http://www.physorg.com/news167278462.html
03:39 SukiFuller: I lost the stream.
03:39 MikeTheBee: I’, OK
03:39 Joe Garde: nah its grand
03:40 Tom Raftery: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/unclimatewarmingintellectualrights
03:40 MikeTheBee: Fan is quiet now as well. Less carbon 🙂
03:41 Tom Raftery: http://greenbiz.com/blog/2009/07/16/walmart-sustainability-index
03:41 SukiFuller: Hehe – packed box was affecting my router
03:43 Tom Raftery: http://www.katescomment.com/carbon-cost-download-vs-cd/
03:44 MikeTheBee: @sukifuller Those Chinese again 🙂
03:45 SukiFuller: @mikethebee and I haven’t even gotten there yet!
03:45 Tom Raftery: http://www.upi.com/Energy_Resources/2009/07/17/Desertec-African-solar-power-for-Europe/UPI-18021247870250
03:49 MikeTheBee: Did you get your invite to visit them yet
03:49 Tom Raftery: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/07/17/bp-gives-up-on-jatropha-for-biofuel/
03:49 SukiFuller: So would the money made from this be pumped back to African nations?
03:50 Tom Raftery: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/07/14/biofuels-bonanza-exxon-venter-to-team-up-on-algae/
03:52 Tom Raftery: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/jimmy-carters-next-urgent_b_240624.html
03:52 SukiFuller: Nice to know
03:54 Tom Raftery: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/jimmy-carters-next-urgent_b_240624.html
03:55 Joe Garde: and in a cork accent too lol
03:55 Tom Raftery: http://sandbag.org.uk/new_map
03:58 Tom Raftery: http://environment.uk.msn.com/news/headlines/article.aspx?cp-documentid=148623002
03:58 Tom Raftery: http://realtimecarbon.org/
04:00 Joe Garde: not the leafblower tho…
04:01 Joe Garde: wind up job?
04:01 SukiFuller: For you yanks that would be flashlight.
04:02 Joe Garde: there’s another device out there you can charge your phones too along with torch etc
04:02 Tom Raftery: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/07/16/gri-touts-46-increase-use-of-gri-guidelines-in-sustainability-reporting/
04:02 Tom Raftery: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/seaicedata
04:03 SukiFuller: @joegarde hmmm, would be a great workout if garden tools worked like that
04:03 Tom Raftery: http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7640.htm
04:03 Joe Garde: ah yes!
04:04 Tom Raftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/20/ipcc-pachauri-climate-change-cost
04:06 Joe Garde: SukiFuller I’m @onlinemeetings on twitter just followed you
04:06 MikeTheBee: Thx, Tom, I kept loosing you.
04:06 SukiFuller: Excellent stuff as always!
04:06 Joe Garde: thanks again tom… gotta go
04:07 Tom Raftery: Thanks guys for all the contributions, great stuff!
04:07 SukiFuller: @mikiethebee then it might not have been my boxes and router then
04:07 MikeTheBee: Ah, I caught the end that time.
04:08 MikeTheBee: @sukifuller, I think you were just a little ahead of me.
04:08 SukiFuller: @mikethebee well can always listen to the recording…I need to follow you on TV

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/18/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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UK Low Carbon Transition Plan

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Earlier this week Ed Miliband, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change launched The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan.

The plan is comprehensive and lays out several targets for the year 2020:

  • * More than 1.2 million people will be in green jobs
  • * more than 1.5 million households will be supported to produce their own clean energy
  • * Around 40% of electricity will be from low carbon sources, from renewables, nuclear and coal (with CCS)
  • * We will be importing 20-30% less gas than we otherwise would
  • * The average new car will emit 40% less carbon than now.

The announcement is a world first because emissions reductions targets from each sector of the UK economy are quantified and policies to achieve them are laid out. More significantly, the budgets are legally binding making the UK the first country in the world to write its carbon targets into law.

The launch was live covered by Twitter members (esp @GuardianECO and @JamieAndrews) posting using the hashtag #UKCPaper

Highlights from the Twitter posts include:

New funding for elec cars, recharging stations in up to six cities

Why only six cities? Surely this is something which should be rolled out nationwide as a single project. With vehicle to grid technologies this would even help the UK government increase the level of renewables on the grid helping meet the 40% low carbon emissions target (with less coal!).

40% of power from low carbon energy by 2020, more in the future

As mentioned above, this target will be met by a combination of renewables, nuclear and coal (with CCS). The inclusion of both nuclear and coal in this figure is bad news. Coal is dirty for all kinds of reasons (coal fly ash slurry spill anyone? Coal ash contains arsenic, copper, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and thallium!) and the problems associated with storage of nuclear waste are well known.

Smart elec meters for 26 million homes by 2020. House by house, street by street transformation

Nice, but as @JamieAndrews pointed out, this just means that the timeframe has just grown longer!

It is not all negative though.

From next April, people can generate own power and feed back in to the grid for cash

£60mil for wave technology, up to £120mil for offshore wind, to support 100,000s jobs

and

Compulsory support from energy companies for vulnerable consumers

are all superb announcements and will help the government reach its targets.

The full announcement is available for download but be warned it is a 228 page pdf behemoth!

In conclusion, this is a hugely important piece of legislation setting out for the first time anywhere legally binding CO2 emissions targets for all sectors of the UK. The policies to achieve them as laid out may not all be perfect (and in the case of continuing to use coal, very far from perfect) but these are just that, policies – they will change at the whim of whoever is in power at any time. The coal and nuclear lobbies are extremely well funded and have managed to inveigle their way into this document at policy level but their days are numbered.

The legally binding CO2 emissions targets will be far harder to change.

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RealtimeCarbon.org gives realtime CO2 intensity of electricity generation in the UK

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RealtimeCarbon

If you actively select for cheaper electricity, you are de facto selecting for greener electricity because cheaper electricity has a higher % of renewable energy in the mix.

I wrote previously that it would be great if utility companies were mandated to publish realtime generation mix (% from coal, % for nuclear, % from wind, etc.).

Then if you had a truly open market for electricity, it should be possible to dynamically switch suppliers on the fly, based on the price and the realtime generation mix. If people were actively selecting for greener electricity (and given that cheaper electricity typically has a higher % of green, why wouldn’t they?), imagine the demand signal that would send to the suppliers! There would be an enormous rush to build more renewables and Kingsnorth would be shelved quicker than you can say “dirty coal”.

That idea is a step closer to reality today with the launch in the UK of RealtimeCarbon.org. This is a site which gives a realtime feed of just how “carbon intense” UK electricity is at any given moment. The data behind the real time feed comes directly from the computer systems that manage the UK’s electricity trading market. This data tells RealtimeCarbon.org how much electricity each type of power generator (e.g. coal power stations or wind farms) are currently producing during any particular 5-minute interval.

One of the beauties of this site is that they provide an xml feed of the realtime carbon intensity data (see the pdf on how to access the feed for more info). The xml feed will allow organisations to programatically monitor the CO2 emissions associated with electricity generation in the UK. Thus it will be possible to have devices programmed to automatically respond to realtime CO2 intensity signals coming from RealtimeCarbon.org i.e. shutting down when highly carbon intensive and starting up when carbon-light. This will be a big help in reducing the organisation’s carbon footprint.

RealtimeCarbon.org also has a forum where people can get involved suggesting methodology improvements, ways to improve the numbers (calculation or display) and how to use the data.

Now they just need to build this out for every other country on the planet!

[Disclosure – one of the companies involved in this project (AMEE) is a GreenMonk client]

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/16/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Renewable energy supply and demand

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Supply and demand

Photo credit Milton CJ

I ReTweeted a couple of posts yesterday from HP’s Ed Gemmell. The posts from Ed were some data about HP’s use of renewable energy in various EU countries. The retweets were:

  • RT @EdGemmell: HP Ireland running on 50% wind power saving 27,000 tonnes CO2
  • RT @EdGemmell: HP in Italy has been running on 100% hydro since Jan09 saving 15,000 CO2 PA
  • RT @EdGemmell: HP in UK has been running on 100% hydro since Feb09 saving 46,000 tonnes CO2 PA and
  • RT @EdGemmell: HP in Germany has been running on 100% hydro since Jan09 saving 37,000 tonnes CO2 per year

Some nice data there and kudos to HP.

Another Twitter user, Thomas Bjelkman replied very quickly with the following response:

@TomRaftery Re HP and hydropower. If the energy mix in the market is the same then the CO2 has only moved from one customer to another.

And, to an extent he is correct. If suppliers in a market generate 200gWh for example, 50% of which is from renewables then you have 100gWh of renewable energy to go around. One co. preferentially buying 10gWh means by definition that there is less renewable energy (100gWh – 10gWh = 90gWh) to go around for others.

However, the flipside is that if companies are preferentially purchasing/looking to purchase renewable energy, this increases demand in the market. And an increased demand signal invariably leads to an increased supply (as suppliers see more demand, it makes sense to invest in more renewable generation to meet the demand).

So, companies who favour renewable energy (and especially if they publish targets to increase the amount of renewables they are purchasing) are de facto helping to increase the penetration of green power on the grid.

More of it, I say.

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Toyota Prius and Honda Insight – Spot the difference?

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Our Toyota Prius

Loaner Honda Insight

I went to Jerez today to collect the a Honda Insight which Honda offered to me to try out. They are letting me have it for a week.

Jerez is about 100km away. I drove there in our Prius and drove back in the Insight. A couple of differences struck me straightaway –

  • First off, the dashboard of the Prius is far clearer – the Insight’s dashboard is not integrated and makes finding the information you want more complex (not something you want distracting you while you are driving)
  • Secondly, the Insight seems more responsive than the Prius – although I wasn’t pushing the Insight, the accelerator was very obviously more sensitive than the Prius’.

In terms of fuel economy, the Prius beat the Insight on the 100km journey with the Prius achieving 5.1l/100km as opposed to the Insight’s 5.5l/100km – it might not sound like much but that makes the Prius 8% more fuel efficient than the Insight in this (admittedly unscientific) test.

I’ll publish more pics and impressions of the insight as the week progresses.

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/14/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.