Willing the grid to be smart
The history of science will reveal, upon close inspection, that “breakthroughs,” like “overnight sensations,” don’t really exist. Human beings forge progress by more prosaic means. The old saw has it that accomplishments are five percent idea, 95 percent sweat equity.
New ideas and the vision and effort needed to realize them often run headlong into the status quo. You can look about, see that coal accounts for half of electricity generation and call it a day. It would be hubris to imagine a change to anything so fundamental.
Not according to the GridWise Alliance. The consortium is laboring to ensure that public policy supports several avenues to a smarter grid. The science is here, the business case is here, the willpower just needs stepping up, via transformer, to drive consensus, in the alliance’s view. The alliance sees itself in the transformer role.
“The way we think about energy needs to change,” Katherine Hamilton, president of the alliance, told me this week. “We have the political climate to promote wise use of this resource.
“We often think of electric utilities as having a monolithic culture, but there’s a lot of very innovative thinking going on today,” Hamilton said. “A price on carbon emissions is coming and people are preparing for that to avoid undue costs.
“The grid has to evolve to meet our demands for the 21st century,” Hamilton continued, warming to her thesis. “It must be digital. Information is dynamic. Renewable energy can be integrated into the balance of generation and load. This is a very new world. Even the electric utilities acknowledge that they cannot build enough supply to meet all demands. It’s not ‘if’ but ‘when.’ We’re working on rules to make this transition in a smart way.”
What part of the status quo is the hardest to overcome?
“The consumer piece is the most challenging, frankly,” Hamilton said. “Our industry hasn’t had to do a lot of that type of work. It has been focused on safety and reliability. It’s a paradigm shift. Now it’s about consumer engagement.”
What are the messages that the alliance would have utilities deliver?
“You don’t have to sacrifice anything,” Hamilton. “Just be smarter about your electricity use. You can have a better lifestyle if you have access to information and you take steps to be more efficient.”
With global warming as a political topic taking a beating in the headlines with revelations of malfeasance at the United Nations Panel on Climate Change, how are political winds affecting the alliance’s thesis?
“When people are out of a job and they have information that enables them to save on their energy use, they’ll use it,” Hamilton argued. “It’s not about sacrifice, it’s about wise use. We haven’t had these choices before. This is something that libertarians and liberals alike can agree on.”
In fact, the alliance maintains a politically neutral stance as well as a technology-agnostic stance, to serve its self-avowed “common sense” purpose and its eclectic membership.
“We’re careful about being nonpartisan,” Hamilton said. “We’re focused on what makes business sense and climate sense and what will guide us to energy independence. The last thing I want to do is politicize something that should be common sense, like clean water. We don’t want to over-legislate, either. Some of our work is monitoring legislation for unintended consequences.”
To get there from here, the alliance’s diverse membership (utilities, vendors, laboratories) engages its challenges via work groups (legislation, implementation, state-level issues, the value proposition, cyber security/interoperability, education/workforce), which produce white papers and reports that can be articulated to legislators.
The alliance leverages its work through partnerships. It works with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on interoperability, with the Future of Privacy Forum on consumer privacy (an upcoming March 2 conference between the GWA and the FPF will hash out “rules that make sense”). It is working with educational organizations to address the educational tracks that will produce qualified engineers and other professionals to replace a generation of pending retirees. In the alliance’s implementation group, consumer engagement is “the linchpin,” Hamilton noted, and a report with recommendations is due out in months.
Last year, the alliance’s focus was on getting smart grid priorities into stimulus funding. This year, the alliance is working to ensure that the stimulus money flows and is spent wisely. It will weigh in on contract negotiations between utilities and the federal government. (Is stimulus funding taxable income to recipients?)
And now, post-Massachusetts’ special election, with midterm elections pending, what is the Alliance’s view of the political landscape?
The glass is half-full, in Hamilton’s view. There’s “renewed interest” in energy and climate legislation, she said.
“The smart grid can get us ‘there,’” she said. “We don’t take a position on climate change. But a low-carbon economy is coming. The smart grid helps us get there.”
Buy the alliance’s perspective and goals or not, but don’t underestimate its intent on moving the needle to “smart.”
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
