rrbatch

Investing in the Smart Grid

"Smart Grid" is mostly Washington hype. Some aspects of "smart grid" have been around for years: I built a house in Maine in 1986 that used off-peak power to store heat in a large, well-insulated water heater, and to heat silica bricks in space heaters. Central Maine Power installed two meters, one for daytime load and one for off-peak, and charged half the rate for off-peak. The system worked like a champ and paid back quickly when compared to a conventional hot water or forced hot air heating system.

I left the house in Maine to work for the Babcock and Wilcox Co. (subsid of McDermott Intl.) in Virrginia, developing a Superconducting Magnet Energy Storage (SMES) system before retiring in 2000. Our SMES (funded by DoE to the tune of $25 million) was much bigger than the flywheel energy stores made by the likes of Beacon (BCON) designed to replace a battery UPS - it could store 100 MJ and discharge at 100 MW. The objective was to stabilize a transmission grid's voltage and frequency in the event of a malfunction like a sagging line shorting into a tree (happens all the time). We tried hard to find a utility customer willing to install and operate a free SMES, to no avail. The bones of the magnet were eventually delivered to the National High Magnetic Field Lab in Tallahassee, FL, where they still sit.

A "smart grid" will do nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; next to zero oil is burned to generate power, >80% is used for transportation and there is no viable alternative to that use yet. The main purpose of a "smart grid" is to maintain grid voltage and frequency stability, which will be increasingly important as the load shifts between intermittent generation (wind and solar) and base generation (coal, gas, or nuclear). In fact without sophisticated instrumentation and control, intermittent generation will be next to useless in a high-power grid. Massive (>100 MW) "power flow controllers" have been built by the former Westinghouse Transmission and Distribution Group, now owned by Siemens. The biggies in this field will continue to be ABB, GE, and Siemens, supplied with high-power components by outfits like Infineon, ST Micro, and Cree.