I’d like to see more on this, with specific reference to the energy and transport section of the Zero Carbon Britain report. See http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com.

Also, there will be lots of specialist energy consultancies looking into these questions, e.g. see http://www.ilexenergy.com. Large utility companies are still reeling from the massive shock of deregulation in the early nineties, and to change the game so fundamentally in the way you suggest would require huge multilateral cooperation and transposition into national law. The questions aren’t easy - e.g. which type of feed-in tariff to go for.

Keep plugging away though, I’ll keep an eye on this.

People that work in electrical power generation and transmission generally aren’t familiar with the Internet and visa-versa. I have a degree in electrical engineering, a background in large grid sychronisation for wind turbines and I am the founder and Managinf Director of a SaaS company. I am unusual in that I have a leg in both camps.

You are absolutely right! Electrical Transmission Systems traditionally look like an old IT model. Generators = Mainframes. Separated Grids with limited interconnect = Closed LANs. The new buzz word is the ‘Smart Grid’. This looks much more like the Internet. If you own a PV solar panel or a wind turbine then you become a read-write user of the Internet, sorry I meant Smart Grid.

I agree with all of the points above, from other comments, that support your argument. And I agree partly with some of the points that counter your argument. Power distribution is different from data distriution in one key respect and we need to bear that in mind.

Moore’s law will not apply to electricity distribution. Technological advances will not reduce the cost or increase the power of electrical distribution at anything like the same rate as for data processing and transmission. Moore’s law is really about processing data with lower and lower amounts of energy per MIP. You can’t process energy with lower and lower amounts of energy. Therefore implementing smarter grids will involve large amounts of capital infrastructure investment. Research TREC as an example of one such proposed project.

In supply chain management there is a phenomenon called the ‘bullwhip effect’. This phenomenon is taught in SCM using the Beer Game. This bullwhip effect is caused by the surprising fact that data and inventory are interchangeable within the laws of diminishing returns. Similar to this effect, the application of data to electricity grids can have an amazing effect on the price reduction of electricity, increase in renewables usage and the stability of the network. The magic key to this utopia is creating large open markets for electricity where anyone can create or consume electricity when the price reaches their threshold for either. The Internet used in parallel with the grid will enable the trading in electricity by ever smaller organisations until each household has a ‘current account’. I see the grids of the future like a giant eBay for electricity.

Keep scratching this surface, Tom. Pandora’s box will open.

Most of the complexities lie in the commercial aspects, here’s what I personally understand on the software aspects.

1. Read/Write -some countries mandate a tariff to buy back electricity from small producers. It can be perverse, like in France it is degressive meaning it encourages people to build lots of small wind farms instead of more efficient larger ones.
ETRM (Energy Risk and Trading Management) is the software that is needed to manage those complex transactions.

2. Reliability. A very personal comment here: much like the trains privatisation, the benefits of the deregulation of utilities are not really perceived by consumers, at least not as much as say telephone. While the cost of telcos has dropped enormously (remember dialling from payphones with calling cards and waiting for the call back?), I can’t say I see similar benefits for rail users and electricity or gas: it’s often more expensive and crucially capital investments in the network are often not sustained. The UK rail system is broken all over and is in a state where fixing is nearly impossible without major disruptions. The US has and will continue to experience black-outs and brown-outs.
Germany and France on the other hand have kept regulated electricity providers and from my own personal experience, the network seems better. Plus of course, generating 80% from nuclear gives France a big advantage now -we outta thank de Gaulle’s vision… Oh, and do check Wikipedia on HVDC.

3. Finally, you’re talking about SmartMeters. Oracle demonstrated those at CS Week in San Antonio and at PowerGen in Milan, the issue is about open standards to connect the meter to the appliances (tell the fridge to be a bit warmer for 1h) and the meter to the utilties billing system.

Just as the energy companies are now seeing the benefits of selling efficiency to their customers, where previously the idea of selling less was definitely less, so I think they will come around to the idea of distributed networks being good for everyone and giving them new markets and new possibilities.

Maybe it will follow the model of the software companies who are effectively out-sourcing much of their R&D by providing access to their software via APIs for amateur programmers to play with. The electricity supply/distribution companies can open their networks so that customers can provide storage, peak shaving and generation and the companies make money by managing the system…

@Brian - Transmission losses are now less of a factor than they were previously and new materials have the potential to reduce these even further.

With the increasing price of oil, the economic imperatives are in place to make this happen

@Meryn - absolutely, this falls in perfectly with the thesis I was putting forward. The plug-in hybrid cars are only one of the read/write options, microgeneration is obviously another.