July 1, 2009

Smart grids key to alternative power

Alternative power — especially wind power — has been in the news quite a bit lately, which is good news. After all, anything that can provide non-fossil energy is welcome.

But, there are problems to be solved before alternative energy sources can truly enter the mainstream.

Electricity is difficult to store economically and moving it around to where it’s needed at any given moment is complicated.

That’s why a lot of people are talking about smart grids.

Imagine a system that could decide when to charge electric cars — preferably late at night, when demand and rates are low.

Such a system would also be able to decide how to move power around from where there is a surplus to where there are higher loads.

That’s the kind of grid we’ll need because there are times when the wind dies or the sun sets, but energy is still needed.

When U.S. President Barack Obama announced a stimulus package, which included US$11 billion for smart grids, he mentioned Boulder Colo., which is on track to be the world’s first city with a smart grid.

But, brace yourself. The grid started there last year will cost $100 million. That’s for one city and not a large one at that. The Boulder metropolitan population is only about 300,000.

Now though, people are beginning to experiment with what are being called virtual power plants.

If it can be made to work, it wouldn’t involve radical changes to the existing infrastructure.

Groups of dispersed power sources, such as solar and wind generators, would be treated as though the group is a single entity, creating the virtual equivalent of a single large power station.

As things now stand, power companies tend to run grids as though new, renewable sources do nothing to help. They just fit the new source into an existing grid and pretty much forget about it.

They take that tack because grids must always match the region’s energy needs, second by second, regardless of any fluctuations that might occur as night falls or the wind dies down. If energy generation doesn’t match energy use, you get power cuts or overloads.

But as investment in renewables increases, grids will need to be able to adapt to less reliable sources

Wind farms are proliferating in Europe, and, lately, in the U.S., and they’re forcing the hand of those who manage grids. When you add in the small, individual operators, who generate their own power, with a small surplus to sell back to the grid, you end up with headaches for the grid operators.

A virtual power plant would consist of hundreds of microgenerators lumped together into a unit similar in capacity to a large power station. But, it would exist in cyberspace. If those sources were a mixed bag of wind and solar, hydro and biomass, then the virtual station they form could be treated much the same as a conventional one, able to produce a flat line of baseload power.

It wouldn’t involve wholesale replacement of the present system. Indeed, it might be done with relatively little modification to existing infrastructure.

The idea has worked well in a small-scale demonstration in Woking, England and, come September, another pilot will be launched in Spain’s Álava province.

The Spanish project won’t use real electricity.

Instead, it will use live data from renewable energy generators in the area, and look for ways to repackage it into virtual plants. The hope is that the 100 megawatts of installed alternative energy capacity in the area could be packaged to provide Álava’s 300,000 population with about half its peak load.

It’s early days, but innovative ideas like this could save a fair chunk of the multi-billion-dollar price tag for building a continent-wide smart grid from scratch.

Korky Koroluk is a regular freelance contributor to the Journal of Commerce. Send comments to editor@journalofcommerce.com.

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