Why the smart grid is inevitable

Phil Carson | Feb 12, 2010

 

A lot of what ZigBee Alliance chairman Bob Heile has to say sails over my head, only partially retrievable with a magic mental net. At one point in our conversation last week, my notes began resembling hieroglyphics.

That's okay, he's trained as a physicist and has decades of experience in wireless data communications and I'm a biologist-turned-journalist. (Talk about the "main disconnect"!)

Heile (pronounced hee-lee) nonetheless can discourse on the nitty gritty in plain language. After a week-long marathon of ZigBee Alliance meetings in Denver last Friday, and before dashing to the airport, Heile sat down with me for a chat.

Heile noted that what follows is strictly his own personal opinion, albeit one steeped in deep involvement in technologies now finding a home in smart grid applications. Sure he's an evangelist for ZigBee, an open, global standard for low-power, wireless networks for monitoring and control products. Initially, ZigBee appears to answer the needs of in-building networks of sensors that will enable homeowners and commercial and industrial building operators to understand and act on their electric energy usage. And Heile thinks ZigBee will become ubiquitous in other applications.

Near the end of a firehose-intensity review of how ZigBee is becoming critical to many smart grid applications, however, I pressed Heile on whether the smart grid as we're envisioning it today really is inevitable. After all, we hear pushback all day long on the topic.

"Yes," Heile said, "but not for green reasons, like global warming. Some of those topics have been used as drivers for the smart grid.

"The smart grid is inevitable for practical reasons. Good hybrid electric vehicles will be a major component of transportation going forward, due to the price of oil and the fact that fuel cells are not mature. Read the tea leaves -- electric vehicles (EVs) are going to become a big driver of the smart grid.

"The question is not whether it happens, but 'how much pain will we experience?'"

American consumers are going to have to live with the interactive nature of the smart grid and the overwhelming fact that power generation will never keep up with future demand, Heile told me. Even if utilities pursued new power generation by every means, American attitudes towards nuclear power, not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiments and demands of the Clean Air Act will constrain new generation to lag behind demand.

"We can't build new power plants fast enough, even without the transportation sector going electric," Heile said. "With EVs in the mix, demand will be huge."

"As a result, the price of electricity may have to get expensive to change consumer behavior," Heile said. "We'll have to pay the real cost of electricity and that means that consumers will have to get smart about how they use it."

"Take the tree-hugging out of it," Heile added. "Do we just get around to [the smart grid] when we can, to avoid rolling blackouts? I hope not. That seems like a remote scenario right now, but it isn't. It's going to happen. The coastal areas with large populations are going to be in deep trouble."

The United States has a good opportunity in this regard, however, because our infrastructure is so old and broken that we need solutions, Heile added. We can pull it together, he insisted.    

"The market will experience a lot of misinformation, a lot of confusion, for the next year or so, before it settles down," Heile predicted.

But more than a dozen large utilities were in attendance at the ZigBee Alliance meeting in Denver last week to understand more about ZigBee's role in the smart grid and keep up-to-speed. For Heile, that in itself is a convincing argument for the smart grid's inevitability.

Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757