Posts Tagged by smart grid
Must Eco-friendliness Come at the Expense of the Economy?
| February 8, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
Here’s a wonderful article that gets at an issue I come across constantly: the implication that environmentalism and job growth are opposed to one another. Considering we have the option to put literally millions of people back to work in renewable energy, energy storage, electric transportation, smart-grid, etc., I’m always stunned when I hear politicians peddling the idea that eco-friendliness must come at the expense of the economy.
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Electric Vehicles and CO2 Emission Abatement
| December 22, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Frequent commenter Glenn Doty writes:
What would really be nice is an infographic comparing the cost of mitigating CO2 with various alternatives… just to put the different alternatives into proper perspective.
For instance, how much more does it cost to abate CO2 emissions by setting up a rooftop solar panel in NJ as compared to installing additional insulation in an office building in Texas or setting up a wind farm in the Dakotas?
This would be extremely instructional to your readers in terms of what policies would make more sense… and it would be fun to look at how you graph the negative CO2 abatement value of EV’s.
I respond:
Ha! I was reading along here, wondering when you were going to make your point about EVs, and lo! (a good word for the season), there it was.
Seriously, please send me a high-level treatment of your reasoning.
At a minimum, there are two things I don’t get. Read More
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Smart Grid Technology Has Long-term Importance But Too Much Useless Chatter
| October 5, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
I just pulled back into my driveway from a few hours at the Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I’m a huge believer in the long-term importance of smart grid technology, but I have to say that there is altogether too much chatter about it at this point. The result of a 40-minute talk on network standards for smart grid communication? There are no standards; they’ve yet to emerge. Oh really? Couldn’t that have been summed up in a 15-word email? Or skipped entirely? Read More
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Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center
| October 4, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
I’ll be hitting the Smart Grid Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center over the next couple of days, and I hope to see numerous 2GreenEnergy readers there.
If you want to meet for coffee, please hit “contact” and let me know.
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Electric Power Utilities Face Issues
| October 2, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
It doesn’t sound like a piece of cake to be a CEO of a power utility. Sure, as we have discussed elsewhere, there are ways to lock in and hide profits, while staving off the world’s insistence that we migrate to renewables. But there are a great number of issues that make life extremely complicated for these folks.
Demand is declining, as technologies for energy efficiency and smart grid begin to reduce the overall consumption of kilowatt-hours.
Even the small incursion of renewables (especially solar) means reduction of on-peak (highest-rate) billing
Utilities will soon be in competition with the oil companies, as people begin to plug in their cars.
Most of the states have done a fairly decent job at legislating Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) that force utilities to cut Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with solar and wind developers.
Overall: times must be fairly interesting at the utilities.
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Another 2GreenEnergy Webinar – Bill Paul on Investing in the Smart Grid
| June 17, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
Earlier today I interviewed Bill Paul in our continuing series of webinars – this one on Smart Grid. I could tell that the audience was engaged; they asked terrific questions and really liked the pace of the whole 60-minute session.
To me, the most interesting aspect of the discussion was Bill’s assertion that “this may not happen.” Though he’s bullish on Smart Grid technology overall, Bill sees many impediments standing in the way of implementing it fully – especially in the US. He points out that there are legal issues associated with privacy, and that the power companies themselves are, as usual, in no hurry to bring about a change – especially one that will result in less total power sold. Bill goes on to point out that, while Finland has one regulatory body that can (and did) simply mandate Smart Grid, we Americans have 50 states, each of which has the power to push this hard, or pull even harder in the opposite direction.
Countering Bill’s concerns, I point out that:
1) Even after a rough start out here on the West Coast, people are going to love Smart Grid – especially to the degree that they adopt electric vehicles into their lives and start to spend a couple of bucks per day fueling their cars with electricity (versus about 4 times that much for gasoline). Time-of-use metering that enables people to buy power at 8 cents a kWh versus 30 cents is going to be perceived as very attractive.
2) Smart Grid is going to happen; it’s simply a matter of time. As I like to say, “Do you think we’re going to be driving Hummers in 100 years?” The only real questions are when it’s going to happen, and who is going to profit from it.
It was Bill’s vast subject-matter knowledge — but also this friendly disagreement — that made today’s webinar such a success. To those of you who may have missed this one, I hope you’ll join us next time.
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Free Webinar – Bill Paul on the Smart-Grid
| June 6, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
Governments are throwing billions at smart-grid development. Industry giants from IT, transportation, and communications are jockeying to dominate what will be a complete transformation of electric utilities.
The world is in the process of migrating from a one-way communication , i.e., flow of electricity from the utility to the customer, to two-way communication, where the billions of devices that use electrical power communicate back to the utility. And the benefits will be magnificent: saving energy, lowering cost, increasing reliability, and ultimately enabling electric transportation and better penetration of renewable energy.
Normally, when I write about such things, it’s to enable readers to understand the issues surrounding how things will work, as well as when and why it will happen. Here, it’s for a different purpose, to let you know how you can profit from it. My colleague Bill Paul has been successfully prognosticating stock market ups and downs for more than 20 years. As a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, and as a commentator on CNBC, he’s earned the respect of investors around the globe.
If you’re interested to know how you can pick the right horses in the incredible steeplechase in smart-grid, mark you calendar and join us for a free webinar, Thursday, June 17, at 10:00 AM PDT (1:00 PM EDT), in which Bill will be “grilled” by a few people – including me – and you, if you’d like to participate.
If you’re interested in “Bill Paul on the Smart-Grid,” sign up here. I’ll look forward to having you in the discussion.
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Renewable Energy is Coming – But Why?
| January 23, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
The other day I wrote a post on my Renewable Energy World blog which garnered a number of interesting comments that I thought I’d pass along. I began the post by indicating that important events in the world generally happen because powerful people make them happen, and that these actions tend to be indifferent to the wellbeing of the vast majority of the world’s population. As an example, I cited George W. Bush’s fixation on removing Saddam Hussein from power and how, in the process, the real threat to world peace and our national security that was developing next door in Afghanistan and Pakistan went unnoticed.
I pointed out that, according to this theory, that although the migration to renewable energy will happen – it will occur for reasons that have essentially nothing to do with the health and safety of our planet, of our nation, and of its people. I provided short explanations of what I see the true drivers: peak oil, public outcry, corporate embrace of renewables, the advent of the smart grid, increases in efficiency of mature clean energy technologies, and the maturation of new technologies.
Of 20+/- comments, most were quite positive. But I was amused by a commentor who wrote:
Do you lefties have to be such drama queens and continue to bring up G.W.? Some of us would like to forget his nonsense. It’s not really much different than what the far right did to the Clinton presidency. Besides, is continuing to make RE a political topic really going to help?
The answer, as I told him, is yes, renewable energy is, in its very essence, a political topic — quite independently of whether he or I want it to be. As I’m fond of saying, the moment you take away the subsidies and force everyone to pay the true cost of the energy they’re producing and consuming, you’ll have ubiquitous clean energy in about 10 minutes.
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Interview with the Electric Drive Transportation Association
| August 19, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Yesterday I had the good fortune to reconnect with an industry colleague, Brian Wynne, the president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association in Washington, DC. The EDTA is an organization supported by members consisting largely of electric vehicle manufacturers and supply chain partners in the electric vehicle industry, whose purpose is to promote the adoption of electric transportation. For years, Brian and his small but energetic staff and have worked tirelessly to assemble and disseminate information necessary for law-makers to make decisions that will ultimately result in the migration of our cars and trucks away from fossil fuels.
In my estimation, the EDTA is a vital force in effecting this massive change that will ultimately pay enormous dividends for all of us, both in terms of stemming global climate change and eliminating our dependence on foreign oil. I was pleased to speak with Brian again, and I’m happy to publish this transcript of our talk.
Craig Shields: What would you say is the state of the EV industry as you see it, Brian?
Brian Wynne: It’s moving forward very quickly. The consumer has an important vote to cast here, and we’ve started with good incentives that will greatly reduce the price premium associated with EVs over their internal combustion counterparts. Now, of course, we just need the availability of vehicles, and this availability changes every week. In addition to the Nissan Leaf, you probably saw that Buick announced a plug-in for 2011.
CS: Yes, the crossover; I did see that.
BW: The gating issue is, as it has always been, batteries. But the Obama administration’s DoE is addressing this aggressively with its $1.5 billion for battery technology development and its $500 million for other components.
The migration to EVs requires the participation of the utilities, as well, and great progress is being made on that front as well.
CS: Please explain for our readers how the EDTA fits in.
BW: We gather and provide objective, credible information to those who need it. We deal with the level of knowledge that exists at any one slice of time, and then provide trustworthy information to build upon that. It’s not journalistic, in the sense of what you folks do at EVWorld, or 2GreenEnergy. We aggregate information and make it available through a variety of sources.
CS: Could you offer an example or two, so we can better understand this?
BW: Sure. Our information is often disseminated through power utilities, as they have relationships with tens of millions of customers. Another example is trade shows. Next year, our presentations on the subject will be made in conjunction with the Washington Auto Show.
And in addition to our consumer-face, of course, we’re lobbyists, we stand for a certain interest. I would say that our interests are completely consistent with the health and safety of everyone on this planet.
CS: Which I suppose can’t be said about every lobbyist on Capitol Hill.
BW: That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that most lobbyists are bad people; they’re simply representing certain interests.
CS: Where is your attention at this point?
BW: Well, one of our jobs is to make sure that this is all coming along in sync and that the policy decisions are providing incentive for the right thing, for example, that they are performance-based, meaning that the biggest credits go to the vehicles that displace the most gasoline.
CS: When I was in your office last fall, we talked about this being a function of the size of the battery. Is that still the case?
BW: Yes. It’s a good assumption that the more kilowatt-hours of energy storage in a plug-in hybrid’s battery, for instance, the less gas will ultimately be used to keep that car on the road.
CS: I write in my blogs, perhaps a bit cavalierly, that what I see as the four main gating factors: OEM production, battery supply, charging infrastructure, and consumer demand, all need to evolve at approximately the same rate – and that I am optimistic that this is, in fact, happening. What do you think?
BW: I guess I agree with that generally, but I have to say that a lot of this is great deal more complicated than it looks. A good example of what makes this so tough is electric power billing. If I’ve driven to grandma’s and I’m charging at grandmas’s, I want the bill to come to me, not grandma.
This is something that has taken a considerable amount of effort to get right, even when you take a much simpler case, say toll collection. Until recently, the RFID device on my car wouldn’t operate anywhere except on the Dulles Toll Road. Now, finally, I can go all the way up to Maine and down to Virginia Beach, which required the integration of systems across various state bureaucracies. The issue is the same—only worse, the power utilities, because they are all regulated differently. Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is a major player in bringing this all off.
CS: How do you see renewable energy playing a role here?
BW: I believe that renewable energy is the most interesting piece of this whole thing. To be honest, electric transportation is not a major driver to the migration to renewables and to building out a smart grid. But global warming is. Our policy makers are totally focused on avoiding a planetary catastrophe; they will not be backing down on this.
CS: That’s good to know.
BW: And speaking of the smart grid, I see this as becoming the new Internet, in the sense of enabling applications that we couldn’t have dreamed of earlier. Now you’re in a car accident, and you use your I-phone to process the claim in real-time: pictures, insurance policies, drivers licenses, etc. – all enabled by the Internet. The smart grid will have that kind of impact on our lives as well.
CS: Fascinating. Thanks so much, Brian. Great speaking with you again.
BW: I enjoyed it.
