Energy grid integration

Phil Carson | Feb 28, 2011

 

When Steve Hauser enters the room, ideas fly like sparks from a welding torch. Questions get answered during the steady flow of Hauser's ideas, not one by one.

Although he might smile at the notion, he's been called the "father of the smart grid," because he's been at the center of technical innovations as well as market adoption efforts since long before the term "smart grid" was coined.

In his latest incarnation, Hauser serves as vice president for grid integration at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, Colo., where he is forging ahead on what he sees as the smart grid's single biggest challenge: integrating the elements that will someday make grids into localized, flexible systems that leverage regional strengths, matching supply and demand through distributed intelligence.

Looking back, Hauser's academic work and career led to his current integration work, but it was anything but preordained. Growing up in the 1960s he aspired to be an astronaut but his math aptitude led him into engineering physics, then chemical engineering. He worked on various technologies at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the late 1970s, early 1980s, then managed a program at Bonneville Power Administration that "planted seeds."

Twenty-five years ago, Hauser and colleagues designed a unit to record energy use data for a thousand buildings across the Pacific Northwest, both baseline and after energy efficiency measures were applied. He learned the value of actual data, versus modeling, and how the paucity of data at utilities limited visibility into how systems actually behaved. Then he worked at the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), which became today's NREL, moving from technology optimization to market adoption strategies. He saw the need to not just optimize individual technologies, but to integrate them all into a complex system with market uptake. And he saw the limitations of the current power paradigm.

"Now," Hauser said, "it's time to change the assumption that over 100 million customers can have access to any amount of electricity at anytime, anywhere." That will bring "unprecedented change" to the power industry and society as "efficiency, flexibility, intelligence and security" become hallmarks of the new grid paradigm. 

Hauser sees a path to a future that's likely to look far different than today's essentially 20th century grid. He envisions a likely, three-step process. Utilities in today's market and regulatory paradigm will first modernize their grid with known technologies. Next, in his view, utilities will adopt the range of technologies and controls being developed today and in the near future. Finally comes "an explosive, Internet-like environment," based on locally optimized systems where every device has intelligence.

Yes, that will require a new societal compact between centralized power generation, transmission and distribution and end-users, as distributed generation becomes ubiquitous and local sub-grids become active players in this exchange, according to Hauser's vision.

Of course, this vision of the future raises big questions and Hauser isn't reluctant to chew them over. What will the new power mix look like? How does one argue to consumers and politicians and entrenched interests that rising electricity prices to ensure a flexible, sustainable, secure energy future is worthwhile?

Meanwhile, however, Hauser clearly believes that the biggest contribution he can make is to enable all the disparate elements of a smarter, modernized grid to work together. And he believes that that will foster the adoption of innovative, local solutions that answer specific needs. As knowledge of successful solutions is shared, they will spread to whichever utilities and markets can use them. Thus, we see the shape of change as a series of incremental steps that quicken in speed and influence until we find that the present looks very different than the recent past.

"That's part of what interests me in this," Hauser told me. "We haven't really addressed the complex ecosystem of energy. It's been mostly technology-focused. It's nuclear, it's coal, wind, renewables, electric vehicles - a lot of attention gets focused on the big technologies. In the end, it's not going to work unless all of that can be integrated. It gets complex really fast.

"There's a sense that if you look back on the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there's been a bit of 'if you build it, they will come' mentality," Hauser continued. "For example, I was recently in Chicago, where I met with the local BOMA chapter (Building Owners and Managers Association). We had a great discussion. One thing they said was that back in the 1970s, the state basically mandated that all new commercial buildings be electrically heated, because they had excess, local nuclear generating capacity they needed to use. So over a decade or so they built a lot of commercial space with tons of electrical heating. Very little natural gas, lots of electricity. Fast forward two decades and now they've got the problem of having to feed this huge appetite for electricity in downtown Chicago.

(We've discussed this project in "Chicago-style Demand Response" and "Load Shifting in Chicago's Commercial Buildings.")

"It'll be a challenge, especially in today's economic environment [to optimize energy use and efficiency in these commercial buildings]. Hopefully, a new mayor will catch on to the vision and provide some political support for what BOMA is trying to do. It makes all the sense in the world to me and it seems to make sense financially. If you're trying to take a long-term view of economic growth for the city, it seems like a slam dunk. If a new mayor comes in and says, 'we need to focus on 2020,' I'd think this would be high on his list.

"I believe that in the next decade, energy management and optimizing energy usage is also going to become a societal norm," Hauser said. "That doesn't mean everyone will do it the same way. My parents, on a fixed income, will do it differently than my college kids in a rented apartment. But that's the beauty of the information technology world. We can accommodate that kind of diversity. It doesn't have to be a one size fits all solution. The magic is in the diversity and the ability to optimize, given that diversity, more than in any one technology that's going to make everything easier and better."

I'll share more of my conversation with Hauser in an upcoming column.

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