A common refrain from the climate denial and delay community is that acknowledging climate change would require astronomical, and they say, unnecessary investments in changing energy infrastructure. The real story? Making those investments is not an option, unless we think we can compete in a 21st century world with a 19th century grid. The electrical grid we have would be instantly recognizable to Thomas Edison, who flipped the switch on the first working model in lower manhattan in 1882.
You don’t need a superstorm to bring down the grid. In the 2003 blackout, the east coast went famously dark due to the apocryphal tree branch in Ohio. The lesson is not lost on those who would wish to make it happen again.
Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Sandy hit the coast, thousands of people still don’t have power. Many are living in shelters because their homes lack heat, hot water and electricity, while thousands more have completely lost their homes. The storm took over 100 lives.
But as utility workers repair an aging American grid — and as climate change promises to bring stronger storms more frequently — Latitude News wonders what the U.S. can learn from the Netherlands’ modern, disaster-resistant power grid.
I asked Wessel Bakker what would happen to power supplies if a storm like Sandy hit the Dutch coast, a storm that comes ashore with 30-foot waves and 80-mile-per-hour winds.
He paused for a long moment, then said: “In the worst case scenario, I think nothing will happen.”
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When Hurricane Sandy barreled through New Jersey and New York, strong winds ravaged local distribution grids — tree limbs became projectiles, power lines snapped and utility poles were uprooted.
It is physically impossible for this kind of damage to happen to the Netherlands’ distribution grid. The wind may blow, but the power lines are safe underground.
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Much of the U.S. grid is designed in star patterns, meaning power lines fan out in straight lines toward homes and communities. That means if a power line connecting a community to the bulk grid goes down, the power won’t come back on until that line is repaired.
But in the Netherlands, the grid is laid out in a circular formation. If you lose power from one direction, you can quickly receive it from the other direction. And, increasingly, the Dutch grid is interconnected with neighboring Germany, Norway, Belgium and the UK. Inter-connectivity improves reliability.
All of these factors — a massive infrastructure designed to resist floods, an extensive network of underground power lines, and a highly interconnected grid — make the Dutch grid far more reliable than the American grid.
“In 2011,” said Bakker, “the average annual outage time for a [Dutch] user was 23 minutes.” Bakker said in 2008, the best U.S. states had an average outage time of 90 minutes. “The worst had about 230 minutes.”
I asked Bakker when was the last time the Netherlands experienced a big power outage. Again, he paused for a long moment: “It depends what you call ‘big.’ There was a large one in the western region about 15 years ago. That outage lasted about two hours.”
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..here are some sobering statistics. A recent report for Congress (entitled “Weather-Related Power Outages and Electric System Resiliency”) estimated that each year storms cost the U.S. $20 to $55 billion in damage and lost economic productivity. However, New York Governor Andrew Cuomoestimated that Hurricane Sandy, one single storm, caused $50 billion in damage, most of it in New York State. That means in 2012, we hit our annual quota in one day. The report, written two months before Sandy hit the coast, also noted: “the trend of outages from weather-related events is increasing.”
Wessel Bakker doesn’t envy the American situation.
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But can the U.S. really do what the Netherlands has done — pump billions, if not trillions, into smart-grid technologies and disaster-resistant infrastructure?
We might not have a choice, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers(ASCE). In a 2011 report called “Failure to Act: The Economic Impact of Current Investment Trends in Electricity Infrastructure,” ASCE called the American grid a “patchwork system” that could break down without a $673-billion investment by 2020. At current rates of investment, the ASCE report says the economy will grow more slowly and be more susceptible to fits and starts induced by nasty weather.
One sector that has been pro-active in learning the lessons of grid failure, the US military.
Microgrids also have the military’s attention as a way for the Department of Defense to make core base operations self-sufficient with both security and efficiency a goal. In some demonstrations it is tying batteries, energy efficiency and renewables all together in a smart microgrid scenario.
• Certainly there are a number of civilian or community-based microgrids under way too – but perhaps not with the urgency that is behind the military’s microgrid maneuvers. For instance, in recent weeks alone:
• Fort Bliss in Texas announced it intends to be the first large-scale, net zero military installation and issued an RFI to seek industry assistance in the effort.
• ZBB Energy Corp. won a Navy contract to provide a 1000kWH energy storage systemfor use in a microgrid application at the San Nicolas Island Naval Facility off the California coast.
• The U.S. Army launched a three-month microgrid technologies project in Afghanistan with the aim of significantly lower fossil fuel consumption on the battlefield and identifying the microgrid technologies with the highest potential in an operational environment.
• Sandia National Laboratory has developed an Energy Surety Microgrid for initial use by the military with hopes of later transferring it to the civilian world.
• Boeing and Siemens announced a strategic alliance to develop microgrid and other energy-saving technologies for the Defense Department.
On that last point, Boeing and Siemens are just two of the many companies jockeying for a role as the Pentagon moves to reduce energy consumption by a third at military bases by 2020 and to have renewable energy sources account for 25% of energy used by 2025.
In stalling the necessary transition to a modern, networked, secure, islandable, smart power grid, the climate denial community degrades US security, comfort and competitiveness in a global economy.
Denial was never a good way of facing challenges.
And yes, I agree we have no choice but to build resilience in all of our networks, including food and water, telecommunications and especially energy and electricity grids. Sandy has taught us what survivalists have long known:
When the shit hits the fan, it’s best to be prepared in advance to ride it out.
Just heard about NYC’s 44 different grids. Sounds definitely like one of those things that need adjusting no matter what. Hopefully it’ll become a priority even if might not sound as glamorous and vote-winning as a good word fight…
This also sounds like yet another opportunity to get people back to work in good paying,non-exportable jobs for a necessary and vital function of society.
one more reason for tea baggers to hate it.
Yes, the Tea Baggers would prefer to spend the money on the military’s foreign entanglements, and so we do:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/NK20Aa01.html
Quoting Nick Turse of TomDispatch: “The Pentagon awarded US$667.2 million in contracts in 2012 and more than $1 billion during Barack Obama’s first term in office for construction projects in largely autocratic Middle Eastern nations”
To be fair, we should remember that the population density in the Netherlands is about 500/km^2, whereas in the USA it’s only 34/km^2. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to set up a nice distribution system with such high densities, be it a distribution system for electricity, bits, or water.
Of course, the situation in America is complicated; we have extremely dense urban centers, much lower density suburbs, and almost empty open areas. There’s no question that we could do MUCH better in urban regions. Indeed, I’d expect the urban areas to be the first to experiment with load-metered pricing and a variety of the other innovations that go along with a smart grid.
The spoke-and-hub system is the most cost-effective system when you’re working at low densities, especially when to take into account voltage changes. At the highest levels of power distribution, the grid is actually more interconnected, with power being shunted along a variety of different routes as loads and sources change. The further down you go in the distribution system, the more linear it gets.
Does anyone with a physics background know anything about this? I always get worried when someone uses the term “free energy”.
This fellow is certainly a hypester but he’s not a charlatan; most of what he’s talking about is technically reasonable. His 2V nanotube filter is the simplest of the technologies, and it’s really not so big a deal; it does pretty much the same thing that curtains do, or for that matter what liquid crystals do. It’s more likely that it will end up being a new technology for flat-panel TVs than something for your windows. He might have a simple on-off filter commercially available in ten years; a television screen would take considerably longer.
The night vision nanotube device is also feasible, although he doesn’t explain where the energy to drive it comes from. Current image intensifier technology is really touchy and expensive; he might be able to dramatically reduce the costs. However, the amount of amplification he can achieve with nanotubes is open to question; you need a long chain of these things to build up the cascade needed to get enough visible photons. My wild hunch is that his first products will be very cheap but not as sensitive as current technology. Given enough time, he should be able to refine it to the achieve higher sensitivity, but remember, we had exactly the same issue with LEDs. I’d guess he can get the weak, cheap night vision technology commercially available in, oh, a bit longer than a decade. Getting higher sensitivity that current technology will take maybe twenty years.
He definitely goes off the tracks with his “free energy” bit. He starts off insinuating that it’s a battery. Yes, there’s lots of research going on with nanotubes to use them as batteries, and they have gigantic potential here. In fact, this area of technology may be crucial in allowing us to save electricity from solar and wind peaks to use later. But it’s still in early stages, so we just don’t know. He also insinuates that this technology might actually generate electricity — it’s hard to tell from his phrasing. If so, he never mentions the source of the energy. Lastly, he suggests that it can be beamed from point to point for energy transmission. Yes, we have a way to beam light from point to point; it’s called a light bulb. If you want to concentrate it, you use a different technology called a laser. The problem is the energy loss in converting electricity to light and back again. I suspect that he’s talking about a high-efficiency converter from light to electricity — the concept is fundamentally the same as his night-vision stuff.
Finally, his desalination technology is another concept with lots of promise but little actually working. Yes, you can use nanotubes for desalination. Yes, they’ve demonstrated it in the lab. But scaling it up to industrial scale is another matter entirely. The problem is that the nanotubes get gummed up with all the other junk in the seawater and lose efficacy rather quickly. He’s probably got something that ameliorates this deterioration.
Notice that he’s very cagey about the way he phrases things. He never actually says that this stuff can be made into products; he instead relies on very blue-sky terminology, which is in fact appropriate for the blue-sky situation we now have with nanotubes. It has lots of exciting potential, but we really don’t know what will end up being practical.
All in all, I suggest you treat about 90% of his talk as hype and 9% as too vague to be informative. The remainder is useful.
Hi Chris
Thanks for that. I guess it all comes down to potential followed by feasability and a healthy dose of as yet unknown technological advancement. I suppose the 1% is a start though if only just to think about what might be possible. thanks again.
Yes, it’s perfectly fine if you treat it as blue-sky talk rather than solid predictions.
The speaker,Justin Hall-Tipping,is the CEO for Nanoholdings:
Their News archive from their website shows the latest “News” as dated Dec 20th 2011. That does not seem like a good sign from a fast moving cutting edge nanotech company…Just saying
http://nanoholdings.com/news/news-archive/
The step from laboratory to commercial production is often the most difficult one. Most brilliant ideas die during berth in the laboratory and never get out.
most of the infrastructure in the northeast is old- designed for a C02 content of around 300ppm- with C02 likely to breach 400ppm next year- the whole grid needs to be updated and strengthened. If not then more catastrophes ahead. The entire country however is surely vulnerable.
But not all is dark; there are working examples of Smart Grid here in the USA. Chattanooga Tennessee has one of the best. As utilities face massive problems in the Northeast, some power companies are exploring preventative measures. Chattanooga’s EPB Smart Grid is touted in the “Wall Street Journal.”
http://www.nooga.com/158309/chattanoogas-smart-grid-featured-in-wall-street-journal/
http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Delivery_Grid_Optimization/How-a-smart-grid-and-data-analytics-from-Bell-Labs-are-empowering-Chattanooga-3936.html
https://www.epb.net/power/home/products/smart-grid/
Anthro,
You and Chris Crawford must be lobbyists for the utes.
Why else would a discussion about the sensible undergrounding of last mile electrical delivery become a matter of the reprehensible “smart(sicI meter scheme to automate meter reading and destroy jobs? Sheesh. the question at hand is whether or not we as a nation can come to our senses and harden our infrastructure against storms. Not to make it possible for rigging pricing so that the inadvertent user of electricity can be forced to pay punitive prices for running her washer/dryer combo in the daytime, which is largely what the scheming devils behind the smart meter concept are envisioning as a profit center.
You do perhaps recall the infamous words of the Enron energy traders?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-620626.html
Quote:
“They’re f——g taking all the money back from you guys?” complains an Enron employee on the tapes. “All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”
“Yeah, grandma Millie, man”
“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”
***
The so-called “Smart Metering/Smart Grid” nonsense is really just a variant on the Enron swindles. It does not solve a real problem (peak shaving) in a sensible way, i.e curtailing industrial loading and large customer AC demand for example. Yet it provides a way to allow punitive pricing to further attack Granma Millie. This is not progress.
Rayduray, I have no idea what you’re talking about; none of it is pertinent to any of my comments.
Chris,
Re: “Rayduray, I have no idea what you’re talking about; none of it is pertinent to any of my comments.”
Let me be explicit to the point of bluntness. The issue at hand is the fact that 8,5 million electrical utility customers lost their power at the height of the Hurricane Sandy incident.
The issue is how to harden the electrical grid so that not nearly so many customers lose power in the storms in our future. They are coming. Let’s not kid ourselves.
But the solutions do not lie is “smart metering”. Not for this problem. The answers lie in undergrounding much of the grid because it is trees and tree limbs falling in high winds or ice storms that cause the preponderance of outages in the U.S.
The other plan which needs to be considered is to re-arrange the geometry of the grid from one of hub and spoke to one with more of a networked circulation of power on the feeders such that if one neighborhood loses power from one feeder from the substation that there is a redundant feeder on a different path that hopefully has not also been taken down by the same storm’s effect on the trees.
Smart metering simply does not address this matter of grid reliability. It is intended to address the issue of peak shaving. Which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Rayduray, improving grid reliability is indeed an issue of concern, but it is by no means the only issue of concern when discuss electricity distribution, nor is it even the most salient economic consideration. Economic losses due to outages are significant — I do not have the figures at hand, but there’s no question that they’re important. The matter will be decided by cost-benefit analysis; we know that higher population densities increase the benefits of underground lines. However, the costs remain high and so far utilities cannot justify replacing conventional aerial lines with underground lines in most cases. The primary means of dealing with outages is tree-trimming, and utilities will likely put more more money into tree-trimming in the future. I don’t know the comparative costs of tree-trimming with under grounding, but from the utilities’ behavior, it seems obvious that tree-trimming has a big advantage.
Meanwhile, the cost of peak power generation is, overall, a more important economic consideration than outage costs, hence the importance of smart grids.
Re: “Meanwhile, the cost of peak power generation is, overall, a more important economic consideration than outage costs, hence the importance of smart grids.”
This is a stupid way of thinking. Look at the German model with widely distributed electrical production. Look at Denmark with community owned wind power. They do not have to consider peak loading as we do in the U.S.
Look then at the over-centralized, over-pampered utility model in the U.S. and realize that we are in a world of hurt regarding peak power because of primarily the greed of the electrical marketers. We as a nation are being held hostage to an insane model which was designed not for engineering efficiency, but for the purpose of concentrating the profits in the system into a tiny number of grasping hands.
I recall with much fury the insane negotiation that took place in California as it was transitioniing from the traditional utility model to the CAISO abandon-the-grid-as-commons model.
It was nuts that the legislature was so well paid off by the utilities that the lege wouldn’t act sensibly to allow co-generation at any of the myriad industrial settings across California which would have meant rational power production, but diminishment of private utility profits.
The mess we are in in the U.S. regarding peaking power needs is simply Americans shooting themselves in the foot (or head depending on which grid you are on) because the system has not been designed for resiliency, low cost of operation and well-distributed generation for redundancy. No, the U.S. system has been designed to satisfy a tiny minority of super-greedy bastards who have created a monster.
And instead of doing the right thing and following the sensible distributed source models that we see working in Germany and Denmark, for example, the insane greedsters have come up with so-called “smart metering” as a covert and malign band-aid to help preserve an idiotic mess of the utilities’ own creation.
“ Sheesh. the question at hand is whether or not we as a nation can come to our senses and harden our infrastructure against storms”
Yes, see Chattanooga area!
Chattanooga was touted in the “Wall Street Journal” as an example just like the Netherlands. (a working example. because Sandy)
See below; WSJ has a pay wall
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/epb-chattanooga-cuts-outages-in-half-after-recent-storm/
How about put your money where your keyboard is at, I bet I payless less for power then you and I have a smart grid and fiber optics. My rate is $7.36 what is yours? And too boot I have a harden infrastructure against storms. It is your quoting vs. my reality. The only one complaining is Comcast.
http://www.kaec.org/images/stand/0607_RateMap.pdf
Oops that was 7.089 cents per kWKh $7.36 is the base price per month
How much would it cost to upgrade our national grid to a smart underground grid?
Let’s keep “smart” distinct from “underground”; the latter would be horrendously expensive if you’re talking about the entire system. Moreover, underground power lines suffer from a problem arising from the capacitance of the lines. If you put two power lines close together, you lose power due to capacitive losses. This is a serious problem with underwater power lines. Fortunately, the problem can be eliminated by going to HVDC systems, which we probably want to do anyway, at least for the long-distance lines. Still, digging all those miles and miles of trenches would be a very expensive proposition.
Going smart is a more easily justified proposition; the problem here is not cost but standards. The primary cost of the system would be the replacement of power meters, which is a five-minute job per unit. The real problem is deciding exactly what capabilities a smart grid should have. The original and simplest concept is peak load pricing: electricity is cheap in the wee hours of the morning when demand is low, and expensive at peak times in the late afternoon and early evening when demand is high. This would help levelize the load, decreasing the primary cost of electricity (the capital outlay).
However, there are a bunch of other ideas. There was an experiment years ago in which the utility gave a small group of consumers a big discount on their rates in return for the power to turn off their big appliances at peak times. IIRC, it didn’t work out well; the consumers resented the loss of control more than they appreciated the (rather small) decrease in their costs.
Somebody proposed putting the entire grid on the Internet; there’d be a URL for your house, and you could access individual appliances from anywhere in the world. Why anybody would want to turn off their hair dryer from Bangalore, I cannot imagine, but the attraction of the idea is that it fits neatly into the smart home ideas.
Another cost issue is bandwidth. Power grids are optimized for a bandwidth of 120 baud — slower than the old 300 baud audio modems we used 30 years ago. Increasing that bandwidth significantly requires changes to every transformer on the grid.
There’s also the matter of changing technology; had we committed to a state-of-the-art smart grid in 1990, we’d be cursing its limitations today. Should we wait for better technologies?
For all these reasons, there’s so much disagreement surrounding smart grids that we’re just not ready to move forward. Some large utilities are seriously considering giving up on a national standard and just building their own smart grid. My hunch is that Pacific Gas & Electric is the most likely candidate for this; they’re big and they’ve got a pretty good corporate culture for innovation.
The above comments of mine were all off the top of my head; afterwards, I thought that it might be a good idea to do a little research and bring myself up to date. The biggest surprise for me was that pilot projects have now become deployment projects. Austin, Texas, has designed a good system and it is now in an advanced stage of deployment. Their big trick was to bypass the power lines for information transfer and use a wireless network instead. This kind of thing works only in an urban or suburban environment.
A group in Italy has fully deployed a pretty good system; it is already generating substantial savings.
As I suggested earlier, there’s still a cacophony of ideas and technologies, but there does seem to be agreement that the only way to proceed is a) separately and b) incrementally. Despite the existence of some super-duper national schemes, the utilities actually working on this stuff seem to have decided to just go their own way. Everybody agrees that it has to be deployed in a series of small steps, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Re: “How much would it cost to upgrade our national grid to a smart underground grid?”
About the amount of money that is squandered each year on the Pentagon.
Rayduray, I am responding to your post of today at 8:14 PM.
Peak power considerations may seem stupid to you, but in fact they dominate planning in all electricity distribution systems. You claim, without citing any evidence, that Germany and Denmark do not consider peak loading considerations. I challenge you to provide evidence to support your claim. You can’t; there isn’t any.
The remainder of your post consists of some grand conspiracy theory. Me, I don’t much cotton to conspiracy theories, especially ones that require millions of people over nearly a century to keep mum in order for the conspiracy to work.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of your post is your claim that almost everybody else is insane, and that you are the only sane person. Right.
When you can’t dispute the facts you decide for a broad-brush ad hominem attack? The weakness of your comment here is obvious.
This is not a matter of ‘you are right’ and ‘I am wrong’, sir.
This is a matter of alternative views of how an electrical distribution should be fashioned to meet the public’s needs in the 21st Century.
I’m an advocate of a widely-distributed multi-point-of-generation and highly socialized grid structure. This is the model that will best serve the interests of the general public in the future.
The grand central station model is justifiably on the wane across the planet. Of course private greedy utility owners in the U.S., who have largely abandoned the grid to a no-man’s-land of rot and disrepair don’t give a damn about electricity as a public good. They only view power production as a means to satisfy their greed. Society has no obligation to acquiesce to such a model.
Let’s lay off the ad hominems, shall we? They do not further your argument one iota. In fact, they make one suspicious of your motivations.
Recall, this discussion started out attempting to answer the question of how do we as a society attempt to ameliorate damage to the grid such that Hurricane Sandy had 8.5 million customers without power for some period of time. This is not a discussion about the needs of central station operators to shape demand on their generation stations. You’ve introduced a red herring that is simply not germane to the problem at hand.
It’s good that you acquiesce to my point that you have no evidence to support your crazy claim that Germany and the Netherlands need worry about peak load considerations. The remainder of your commentary, sadly, is nothing more than repetition of your conspiracy theories, so I’ll leave you to them.
Best wishes.
Well, I suspect that at least one of us in this inane conversation is an anonymous troll.
National Academy
“The Grid:
A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World”
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11735&utm_medium=etmail&utm_source=The%20National%20Academies%20Press&utm_campaign=Holiday+Mailer+2012&utm_content=Downloader&utm_term=