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My Smart Grid Experience

By Kennedy Maize

Here’s further evidence why I believe the current smart grid hoopla is bogus, and North America should be focusing on a strong grid instead.

I live on a small farm in rural Maryland, some 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. My electric company is Allegheny Power, a distribution subsidiary of Allegheny Energy, based outside of Pittsburgh. I have no big-picture complaints about Allegheny Power, although it does seem to kick off momentarily more often that I would like.

The parent company once had a radio advertising campaign talking about an “Allegheny Energy moment.” My wife and I, who both rely on our computers for our living, used to laugh about the off-on outages, just enough to shut down the PC and destroy the current file, as “Allegheny Energy moments.” The company no longer has those ads running in my area.

This week, on Tuesday and Wednesday, we had real outages — more than two hours each. I know the cause of the Tuesday outage — lasting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. According the utility’s computerized voice recognition customer service software (it speaks very slowly and carefully and is really stupid), it was a tree down on a power line. No big deal.

Wednesday’s outage remains a mystery. The Allegheny Power computer voice (can we call him Hal?), which recognized my voice just fine on Tuesday, couldn’t understand me on Wednesday. It was 3 p.m. and I hadn’t been drinking, so I don’t know what was going on, but I persisted and enunciated as clearly as I could and pressed enough numbers on my old-fashioned, keep-ready-when-the-electric-power-fails, touch-tone phone (remember those), because my cell phone connection to the utility customer service center stinks. I’m always amazed that when I lose power, I don’t lose phone land-line service. Same poles.

So I eventually got through to a real, and very nice, young woman to report the outage. I told her the details, and my address. Then, to my astonishment, she asked me for driving directions to my house, in case the repair crew had to work on the transformer that connects my farm to the distribution grid.

“You don’t have MapQuest of Google Maps?” I asked. Not on her computer, which was down at the moment, but didn’t have Internet access in any case. “The computers are down more often than they are up,” she said. “Particularly when there are power outages.”

The crews don’t have GPS systems? Nope, probably too expensive for corporate.

My jaw dropped. Good GPS systems are available at $200 or less for individuals. I suspect a large electric utility could buy them for a lot less per unit. And I suspect they could be easily tied into the utility’s SCADA system. No brainer.

And that’s why, in my judgment, the smart grid won’t ever come to pass. The folks who run our electric grid today are brainless. Old, entrenched, mature industries, as many business analysts have observed in the past, are really bad at innovation. That applies directly to electric distribution utilities. It’s true for power generators, but much more for distributors.

If utility managers can’t figure out the value of satellite navigation systems for repair crews, what hope is there for smart toasters and time-of-day pricing?

The most important task, when it comes to today’s grid, is to get it beefed up, interconnected, and operationally rationalized. The EPRI lemon-meringue-pie-the-sky smart grid will never come to pass in the lifetime of anybody alive today. Nor should it, if we can’t get the basic grid right.

When it comes to transmission and distribution interconnections, I’ll take robust over smart any day. I’ve been hearing about smart houses, and smart appliances, and smart grids for a quarter of a century. They’ve never made any sense to me.

Among the daunting, maybe show-stopping, issues for the smart grid are communications protocols and standards, the cost of data-pushing dongles on power lines, and whether the smart grid is the high-voltage grid, or the local distribution grid, or both. The smart grid concept doesn’t work unless it includes the big pipes and the little pipes. That’s a mind-boggling task. It makes reforming U.S. health care look trivial.

So, as far as I can tell, all the hand waving (and money spending) on smart grid technologies is fluff. Let’s focus on getting power to people 24/7/365, not controlling their refrigerators and cycling their AC.

Skepticism Rises on Plug-In Hybrids

By Kennedy Maize

After almost unrelenting hype, skepticism about plug-in hybrid cars is beginning to emerge in the mainstream media. It’s a good thing, as much about the much-ballyhooed vehicles, particularly the General Motors Chevy Volt, doesn’t withstand serious business or technical scrutiny.

In early June, Jim Motavalli at the “Wheels” blog at the New York Times said Toyota, the prime mover in the conventional hybrid world with its Prius car, has serious doubts about plug-ins, which feature rechargeable batteries capable of propelling a car some 40 miles, and then having a much smaller gasoline-powered engine kick in to recharge the batteries. These are also known as “extended range vehicles.” Once at the destination, or back home, they plug into a conventional outlet for a recharge.

Electric generators love the plug-in idea (indeed, the earliest champion was probably the Electric Power Research Institute) because it gives them new load at a point where they were often dumping power – overnight. The idea is that plug-in commuters would connect their cars to the grid when they got back from work in the evening, when electricity demand is low. Earlier, they loved electric-only vehicles, such as GM’s EV1, which proved way too expensive for anyone other than the Hollywood set.

The Times blog reported that a key Toyota official told a presentation in New York that the plug-ins won’t deliver the kinds of performance that advocates predict: 100 miles per gallon of gasoline. The problem – as it is with any concept concerning electric cars – is battery technology. The lithium-ion batteries envisioned for the plug-ins, Toyota’s Irv Miller said, become a “boat anchor” once they are discharged. The blog quoted Miller: “This dog doesn’t hunt.”

In a long thumb-sucker in the Sunday, June 7, Washington Post, GM executive Bob Lutz, who has been pushing the Chevy Volt, acknowledged that the car makes little economic sense for most buyers. “If you look at most of the mainstream media, you get the impression that 95 percent of Americans today want a vehicle like the Chevrolet Volt or a [hybrid such as the] Toyota Prius,” Lutz told the Post reporter. “And that, by God, the reason General Motors is in trouble, is that we have not offered a vehicle like that. But when you look at the reality, at today’s fuel prices, most Americans still want a conventional car.” Like the Corvette that former fighter pilot Lutz drives, and the Toyota Highlander that I drive.

So why is GM putting so much money into developing and promoting the Volt plug-in, an almost sure money-loser? It’s about market perception, according to Lutz, noting that GM suffers from a bad case of Toyota envy. “We need [the Volt]. It has a chance to change our image,” Lutz said. Toyota, he noted, loses money on every Prius it sells, but the hybrid gives the Japanese company marketing cachet as seriously green, helping it sell its profitable SUVs and pickup trucks in the U.S. when folks come into the showroom to look at the distinctively-style Prius.

In the New York Times blog, Bill Reinert, Toyota manager of advanced technology, said he suspects claims for plug-in hybrid technology of 100 miles per gallon are hyperbole. Because of the weight of the battery packs, he said, the underlying frame and running gear must get more robust, which means heavier. “We can achieve 50-55 miles per gallon,” he said of plug-in technology. “But after that, there are diminishing returns. We enter the world of Star Trek,” where anything is technologically possible.

I’ve long been skeptical of any electro-automotive technologies. That includes conventional hybrids, which are unlikely pay off their premium cost with lower gasoline consumption during their lifetimes. The plug-in has always struck me as totally pie-in-the-sky, and it seems that credible folks in the auto industry, including Bob Lutz, a “car-guy” to the bone, agree. Battery technology is still the technological Achilles Heel, as they have been since Henry Ford’s wife drove an electric car.

Sorry, electric generators, but I suspect the future of high miles-per-gallon vehicles is a technology from the late 19^th century: the diesel engine.