MIT: how to integrate more renewables

The MIT Energy Initiative is holding a free webinar March 12, broadcast from a live seminar at MIT. The event will discuss the results of the MITEI symposium on how to leverage renewable power sources without relying on storage:

Briefing on the Final Report of the Symposium on Managing Large-Scale Penetration of Intermittent Renewables
Monday, March 12, 2012 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM (Eastern Time)
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The focus of the symposium was on how renewable energy standards affect power system capacity planning and operations, assuming affordable, scalable electricity storage options will not be available for at least a decade, and probably more. Until such breakthroughs materialize, capacity planning and implementation are still required.

Currently, 29 US states and 27 EU countries have renewable energy standards. As countries increasingly embrace intermittent renewable resources, they will confront the operational challenges this poses for baseload power generation and generators. The results of the symposium, including commissioned white papers and other submitted technical papers, will be included in the report that will be available at the event.

The website for the April 2011 symposium has nearly 30 papers or presentations about how to combine renewable energy with traditional sources to level out electricity supplies — in lieu of relying solely on baseload generation.

I am looking forward to the presentation, which I hope will discuss the forest rather than the trees. Trying to make sense of the papers individually seems like trying to understand a forest from its constiuent leaves and twigs.

In looking up the earlier symposium, I also ran across another MIT study released in December that looks at the impact of renewable energy generation upon the electricity distribution grid. This MIT team concluded that federal preemption is the only way the US will get enough transmission lines necessary to carry this renewable energy.

The MIT press release quotes the study director, former Sloan School dean Dick Schmalensee:

While the grid is not in any imminent danger, he says, “the current regulatory framework, largely established in the 1930s, is mismatched to today’s grid.” Moreover, he adds, today’s regulations are “highly unlikely [to] give us the grid of the future — a grid that by 2030 will support a range of new technologies and consumer services that will be essential for a strong and competitive U.S. economy.”
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While the grid’s performance is adequate today, decisions made now will shape that grid over the next 20 years. The MIT report recommends a series of changes in the regulatory environment to facilitate and exploit technological innovation. Among the report’s specific recommended changes: To enable the grid of the future — one capable of handling intermittent renewables — the United States will need effective and enhanced federal authority over decisions on the routing of new interstate transmission lines. This is especially needed, the report says, in cases where power is produced by solar or wind farms located far from where that power is to be used, requiring long-distance transmission lines to be built across multiple regulatory jurisdictions.

“It is a real issue, a chicken-and-egg problem,” says John Kassakian, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT and the study’s other co-chair. “Nobody’s going to build these new renewable energy plants unless they know there will be transmission lines to get the power to load centers. And nobody’s going to build transmission lines unless the difficulty of siting lines across multiple jurisdictions is eased.”

Currently, when new transmission lines cross state boundaries, each state involved — and federal agencies as well, if federal lands are crossed — can make its own decisions about permission for the siting of these lines, with no centralized authority.

“There are many people who can say no, and nobody who can say yes,” Schmalensee explains. “That’s strategically untenable, especially since some of these authorities would have little incentive ever to say yes.”

In other words, the MIT technocrats concluded that we need a national policy to address the NIMBY problems that have plagued both solar farms and distribution grids in California. It sounds like a good idea, but (as in the the solar farm example) requires resolving the conflict between RE-loving environmentalists and NIMBY environmentalists.

A smarter way to deploy smart meters

It’s no secret that PG&E has created an enormous controversy in California — encouraged by the PUC — with its aggressive push to force smartmeters on its customers. The newspapers and TVs have run story after story on the controversy, there have been hearings and a state investigation, and still cities are “banning” smart meters on a variety of grounds.

The imposition of smartmeters is the ultimate manifestation of a technocratic view of energy management, fueled by $3 billion in stimulus money. On the one hand, smart meters allow demand management and time-of-day metering, and are seen by many as the lynchpin of $200 billion in worldwide investment on bringing the electric distribution grid from the 19th century into the 21st.

On the other hand, customers are seeing their bills increase — both to pay for the meters and for time-of-day use — without any increase in the available energy. The meters are being fought on the left over price increases and on the right over the invasion of privacy.

Now a Texas utility wants to try a different approach. As VentureBeat reports:

It’s interesting to see that one pilot happening in the U.S. is coming at the game with a new approach: Focus on the making the consumer happy about the smart grid. In particular, it wants to demonstrate that the smart grid can improve the quality of consumers’ lives, much in the same way apps add value to the lives of iPhone and smart phone users.

Brewster McCracken, director of the Pecan Street Project in Austin, Tex., says its smart grid demonstration project is unlike any others in that is most concerned with the value to the customer, and not the utility. Part of the project’s goal will be to study how — and whether — the smart grid can provide value to the customer.

How about that? A public utility working to do something that benefits customers? (I’m guessing they came up with this on their own, without any help from the Public Utility Commission of Texas.)

The idea of being customer-driven is not something that comes naturally to big monopolies, particularly utility companies who get their revenues by spending money by lobbying for rate increases, then increase their rate base that is multiplied by guaranteed rate of return. (NB: This culture proved to be a disaster for the phone companies during the 1980s and 1990s when they actually had to compete for customers.)

This also applies to the big suppliers to the power companies, who wouldn’t know a consumer if one bit them on the backside. Even GE — with more than $90 million spent on its Ecomagination consumer PR blitz — isn’t really interested in listening to customers, but instead wiring its meters into local smart grid procurements.

With their assumption of all-knowing, all-seeing command-and-control planning, the top-down government bureaucracies are even worse than the top-down ones at the utilities or the industrial manufacturers. If you want to see Soviet-style central planning in North America 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is where you’ll find it.

So the Austin public-private collaboration and its leaders should be applauded for their initiative. The old “small is beautiful” Jerry Brown would have loved and trumpeted a decentralized initiative like this, but I guess the state budget quagmire and its $25 billion deficit are occupying 110% of his attention right now.

Smart Grid: a primer

So far I've been to one Smart Grid event and read only a few articles that were at all useful. All of the best stuff has been from the IEEE Power and Energy Society, which not surprisingly has a major emphasis on educating society about plans for a 21st century distribution system.

For those not up to speed, there is a good primer in the IEEE December newsletter, The Institute, which I get as an IEEE member. (At the end of the semester I get behind on my mail and journals, so I just caught up today.)

Here are a couple of opening paragraphs from the article:

The electricity grid is made up of four main components: generation, transmission, distribution, and customers. Generation refers to the production of electricity from sources of energy, such as coal and natural gas. The transmission system carries the electric power from the generators over long distances to a distribution system, which brings the power to the customers. Distribution systems can include power stations of their own.

Developing countries often have antiquated systems. But even more modern systems, which in a developed country such as the United States can be 50 years old or more, are typically inefficient, unreliable, polluting, incompatible with renewable energy sources, and vulnerable to cyberattack.

It’s a little rah-rah on the technology, but then what do you expect from a bunch of engineers? At least — unlike GE or PG&E or SDG&E — it’s not peddling a specific product or service.

The Department of Energy has a website and a 2008 report that seem even more rah-rah. The latter is a propaganda piece worthy of a political campaign (or lobbying for increased appropriations) rather than a textbook or scientific article.

Still, the smart grid issues are essential for instituting distributed generation with unpredictable interruptions such as residential rooftop solar and small scale wind. So even if smart grid is not an RE fight, it’s one that RE depends on.