Myths Associated with the ‘Smart’ Electrical Grid
Media accounts about the electric grid, the “smart grid,” and cyber attacks have been misleading, if not completely wrong. Much hoopla and misinformation comes from vendors selling panaceas, and scaremongers selling their services.
Disclaimer: In the time between the writing of this article and its publication, this blog post came out and was linked at Instapundit. The author was completely unaware of any such industry group and any such agenda (though the issue itself is obvious), and is completely unconnected with any such industry group. This specific issue will be addressed in Part II of this article, and has no direct bearing in this, Part I.
Much has been written in the popular media and blogosphere in the past decade about the electrical power grid, some of it good, much of it bad, much of it downright silly, and almost all of it incomplete.
A good example of the silly can be found in this recent piece in U.S. News & World Report by Alex Kingsbury:
But while it may have been a technical wonder at the time of construction, the nation’s power grid has become dangerously antiquated over the past few decades. If technology in the home is racing ahead at broadband speed, the power grid is stuck back in the days of rotary-dial phones. According to industry statistics, the dog food industry spends more on research and development than the electrical sector does. Aging technology means more frequent blackouts, a greater vulnerability to computer hackers, and, perhaps most insidious, colossal inefficiency. As part of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration has pledged $3.4 billion toward “smart grid” technology — the next generation of infrastructure, meant to stabilize the grid in the event of a failure, incorporate green technology, and vastly improve efficiency. But those billions are a drop in the bucket toward bringing the entire national grid into the 21st century, which could take decades and cost upwards of $100 billion, some experts estimate.
This is silly on several levels, starting with the comparison with the dog food industry and the internet, and the specious reference to “it” as a single entity constructed all at once. And I would question his numbers, but the article isn’t sourced.
“Aging technology” is a nonsensical term, because the technology can’t get old unless there’s a new technology in the wings to replace it, and the argument that there’s not enough money in R&D undercuts the implication that there has to be newer technology waiting. Furthermore, older analog technology can’t be more vulnerable to computer attack, if it’s not based on computers. The “colossal inefficiency” claim is completely unfounded, and as I will show, nonsensical. But then, somehow, by making everything “smart,” the system will be less vulnerable to a cyber attack than without all the computers. And that’s not even touching the “green technology” wasp’s nest, which is a whole article by itself.
Clearly this leaves a bit to be wanted in the way of an explanation. Let’s start from the beginning.
Myth #1: There exists a monolithic “national electric grid.”
The North American continent north of the Mexican border consists of a number of regional reliability councils as designated by the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Those are members of one of three major “interconnections,” which are essentially independent networks, with very limited ability to exchange power between them, since it must be done with expensive D.C. interconnects. The three major interconnects consist of Texas, Western, and Eastern. There are also smaller ones in Alaska and Quebec.
Myth #2: The “national grid” is vulnerable to a system-wide failure.
Because of the minimal connections between interconnections, a system failure in one interconnection won’t spread beyond that interconnection. In fact, historically, the major cascading failures in North America have all been in the Eastern interconnection, and further, have been limited to the densest portion of the Eastern interconnection. So the argument that the entire national grid is vulnerable to a system-wide failure is wrong on at least two counts: 1) any doomsday failure will be firewalled at the limits of the interconnection, and 2) history has shown us that these kinds of failures usually fizzle out, leaving most of the Eastern interconnection unaffected.
Myth #3: The federal government needs to rebuild the grid.
With the exceptions of the federally owned hydropower authorities (Bonneville, TVA), the federal government doesn’t own or operate the transmission or distribution infrastructure. It’s never been the mission of the federal government to own and operate a national grid; indeed there is no such thing. The utilities that own and operate the existing transmission apparatus should be able to finance any capital improvements the way it’s always been done — with private financing, based on expected return on investment.
There are only certain specific corridors that are under great stress. The capital improvements that must be made are not spread all over the country. Much of the existing infrastructure is at less than full capacity. There is a benefit to having wires at less than full capacity, aside from the ability to handle growth: they waste less energy. So part of the economic calculation that the owners take into account is how much power can be saved by having oversized wires.
Do certain pieces need to be replaced? Probably. But the financial mechanism for that should already be in place. There should be funds for periodic replacement of capital equipment. This is nothing new, and should be a routine matter of finance. This is basically an internal matter that their maintenance departments should be dealing with on an ongoing basis.
There is a minor federal role in regulation of the grids. NERC, the private nonprofit corporation founded to regulate reliability, operates under the auspices of the federal FERC, which has responsibility for regulating other utility networks, such as gas pipelines.
Let me repeat part of the breathless claim in the above linked article:
As part of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration has pledged $3.4 billion toward “smart grid” technology — the next generation of infrastructure, meant to stabilize the grid in the event of a failure, incorporate green technology, and vastly improve efficiency.
This doesn’t merely suggest that “smart grid” technology will improve energy efficiency; it outright claims that it will “vastly” do so. This is nonsense. The “smart grid” (which the author never bothered to define) will provide other benefits to the utilities, and will result in some very marginal energy savings, but will not “vastly improve efficiency.” Let me explain:
Hey it’s all about turning your electricity off when the commissar decides you have had more than your fair share. What they do in Kenya and Venezuela.
Nothing smart about an off switch.
Green technology, the biggest scam on earth.
“According to industry statistics, the dog food industry spends more on research and development than the electrical sector does”…not sure how he’s defining “electrical sector,” but the significant R&D is done by the equipment manufacturers…GE, Siemens, etc…not the utilities. Which makes sense: mmost improvements to turbine efficiency, for example, can only be made by whoever is *building* the turbines, not someone who is only buying and running them.
The last two points most likely tell the intent of the original writer. That is, avoiding building new powerplants (especially nuclear ones) at all costs. (The wet-dream of the neo-Luddites.)
As for demand surges on hot days due to air-conditioning, I’m sure the original author intended that as a snark about people with AC in their homes. Never mind that many people don’t. (I don’t, for one, and have never felt the need for it.) In fact, the primary culprits in AC-caused load surges are- offices with major computer and other electronic systems, which require cooling during use. The hotter the weather, the more you turn the AC in the office up to keep the equipment from going into overheat shutdown.
The “smart grid” the writer is having vapor dreams about will only exacerbate that factor. Not that the “smart grid” advocate believes that, I’m sure.
clear ether
eon
Without knowing where you live, I can’t comment on your not having air conditioning in your home. However, in many parts of the country, air conditioning is close enough to 100%, that the difference isn’t worth talking about. I know many people who leave the AC on when they are at work, because they want to walk into a cool home. (Another factor is it may take half an hour or more to cool down the house once they get home. Beyond that, could you imagine the jump in electricity useage, if everybody turned on the AC when they got home from work?)
You wouldn’t believe the number of people who won’t even spend $10 to buy a programmable thermostat, that would easily save them $20-$30 a month.
And therein is the dilemma with heating and AC – the most energy efficient strategy is to use the appliance when you need it, but the best strategy for the utility is to run these things at night when you don’t need them. Another related dilemma: this works if you have a less energy efficient tank-type water heater, but won’t work with the more efficient on-demand type.
The desire to save energy and the desire to level power are usually at cross purposes.
There’s no way to shift your AC from 5pm to 5am, however if the power company can lower the afternoon spike, even a few percent, it does help.
I remember reading an article a good 30 years ago. Some company was proposing pellets into drywall. The idea was to try and increase the thermal mass of your home. During the day, when it was hot, these pellets would absorb heat by melting. Then at night, you could cool down the house and cause the pellets to re-solidify. To my knowledge, this product never got past the talking about stage.
Did we read the same article?
A bit of historical perspective. The Great New York Blackout of 1965 was such a great problem because the secondaries of the supply transformers were networked together into one massive network with multple feeders. The concept was that the loss of a few feeders would never lead to a loss of the whole network because each feeder was such a tiny percentage of the overall total. The problem was that the mechanical network protector relays did not function properly, allowing the network to reverse feed the feeders. That shorted out the network. It took crews days working with hacksaws to subdivide the network into small enough pieces to allow the good feeders to energize those smaller networks.
The Solid State Network Protector Relay was designed and intergrated into con Ed’s network as a result. The “smart grid” has existed since the 1970s.
http://www.eti-nj.com/pdf/MNPR%20booklet%202002.pdf
NYC and several other very large cities are special cases. Tying secondaries together is only done in high density cities. Interestingly, the Dept. of Homeland Security is in the process of installing a superconducting loop in Manhattan, in order to deal with this brittleness with a fundamentally new technology. As far as I’m aware, this will be the first in the world.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/18790/?a=f
Newer transformers are a little bit more efficient than older ones. But we are only talking a few percentage points.
The smart appliance technology that the author talks about saves money by shifting some of a plants load from the middle of the day, to a time when it isn’t working as hard.
If the load in the middle of the day ever exceeds 100%, then the utility will either have to go with rolling blackout, or buy electricity from some utility that isn’t bumping up against 100%. Both options are very expensive.
Getting a higher useage factor out of existing plants will save money, but it won’t save energy.
>>>The smart meters can only observe the power going into your house. They have no shutoff or modulating capability.
From what I have read, smart grid proponents have been pushing the idea that every consumer should, could, and will generate green energy via solar arrays and windmills, and pump the unused capacity back into the grid.
Will this foolishness not require an endless array of interlocks and remote disconnects if safety standards are to be maintained? (Hint: think maintenance)
The safety issues with this would be a real headache. The local generation would have to know when the utility line is down, and shut off so that the crew could work on the line. What could possibly go wrong?
There’s not necessarily a safety issue. Properly installed wind or solar systems that feed back into the grid have an automatic safety cut-off – if grid power goes down, the wind/solar shuts down. Its inconvenient for the homeowner when this happens, but its safer for linemen working to restore power.
And hope that the thousands of safety interlocks all work properly? On top of that there is the nastiness of phase matching, both voltage and current, and that with changing reactive loading.
One of the chief culprits behind the over-hyped “smart grid” is GE. Between that and their current efforts toward an international carbon credit exchange, they have done nothing but bite their original meal ticket, the electric utilities, on the a$$, hard. If Thomas Edison could see what the snotty little politician ba$t**d, m*therf***er Jeff Immelt is doing to his company, he’d be spinning in his grave!
But I don’t really have strong feelings in this matter. Just a detached observer. . .
Good stuff, but #4 is off. AMI networks connected to smart meters will indeed allow for remote disconnect, and the IOActive smart meter worm was an actual proof of concept, not just theory. (How the worm would work against an actual AMI network is sketchy.)
Also: besides PCTs and IHDs it’s unlikely that utilities will allow any other home devices or appliances (i.e. washer, dryer, fridge, TV, microwave, etc.) connect to the meter, “smart appliance” or not. Utilities want to be able to send demand response events to PCTs and to inform customers of what their energy costs right this minute (dynamic pricing), not to control every appliance in the house. Not only would that require some heavy customization on the smart meter, no utility is set up for that level of data and device management. 15 minute interval data is going to be hard enough to manage.
Overall some good points though.
The actual issues with hacking into a meter will be addressed in the next installment (it’s not as easy as hacking a computer), but a 200 amp (let alone 300 or 400 amp) automatic disconnect physically won’t fit in a meter. Never mind cost (which is substantial), it just takes up way too much space. They could put a separate device on the pole, but it’s not economical. Not going to happen.
That’s odd then that every smart meter we evaluated, and eventually purchased, has a remote disconnect feature.
And yes, trust me when I say that I’m quite aware of what it takes to hack a meter.
Interesting point, since
a) I take Larry’s point about size and cost of a 200 amp cut-off, but
b) Eric certainly seems to speak from experience.
Could one of you post a link to a smart-meter spec?
As I feared, we’re getting gummed up on terminology. The “feature” does indeed exist on some meters in some areas. It’s a relay to operate a bigger external relay to disconnect some specific load. IOW, it’s a variation on the “smart grid” concept. It’s not a whole house disconnect. As I said in the “smart grid” section, it’s possible for a hacker to get at this, but they can’t shut the whole house or business off.
If the expendable load is really important though not urgent (such as a refrigerator), I would expect there to be a way to take it offline and make it work no matter what the meter is telling it to do (of course, you pay a penalty for doing this).
Expanding on the concept that everything has tradeoffs, you could use a two pole solid state relay to disconnect the meter to reduce the size of the disconnect. Heat dissipation is about 1% of load current, so for a 200 amp 120/240 service you’d need to sink 200 amps x 120 volts x 1% or 240 watts. That can be done, but it is a parasitic load whenever current is flowing and it would be more vulnerable to lightning.
There is a lot to be said for mechanical contacts, especially if they are oil quenched (or SF6 quenched, but Algore would have a conniption if he saw the Global Warming Potential of SF6).
You don’t get to use 120v for that calculation. In reality, the load will be a lot smaller, but for design purposes you will be required to use 200 amps @ 240 volts. Using your 1%, that’s 480w. That’s a lot of heat dissipation to bury in a wall. I don’t think the sockets are rated for it.
But I think we’re getting off the original point. The benefit to shutting the whole house off remotely doesn’t justify what it would take to do it.
Larry,
Not to belabor the point but we do sell an electric meter with a remote shut off feature – the Elster Rex meter. It is actuated from the AMI system for nonpayments or account changes in areas like Vegas where there is a large turnover in rentals.
http://www.elstersolutions.com/en/rex.html
John, the data sheet is a bit sketchy, but that’s what it seems to say, so I stand corrected. I’d like to see more detail; actual disconnect hardware, agency approvals, and so on. I’m still not worried about it, but that’s in the next installment. BTW, do you have any material on the hacking issue wrt your meters?
Eric, to expand on what you wrote: I have a home automation system that can take actions depending on the setting of an electricity rate variable. I agree with you that what a smart-meter system should do is not control any of my appliances directly. Instead, what it should do is inform my automation system what rate is in effect at a given time, and then let me or my system decide what to do about load management. I follow this issue on various home automation forums and I have yet to see a report of a utility system that will communicate with a homeowner’s system.
Lots of good points…thanks for the article.
The hype over the smart grid is all about wind and solar power. These systems are not baseload generators, and the output fluctuates all over the place depending on conditions. In addition, these systems work best in disparate locations that are often far from large populations.
If we reach the goal of 20-30% of power generation from these devices, power distribution becomes a total nightmare. In reality, it is probably unworkable.
Can you imagine trying to match phase of voltage and current while compensating for randomly distributed inductive loading during an afternoon heat wave in Phoenix Az, with millions of home windmills generators and solar voltaic cells systems, distributed willy-nilly around a changing power grid? Yikes!
Its old infrastructure, not old technology that is an issue. There’s nothing wrong with old technology. That point was driven home to me by a chief when I was in the Navy. I was complaining about the sub having 1950′s tech, the chief looked at me and said: “Heres the situation, your 500 feet under water, do you want: A. Old Technology with a proven fifty year track record, or B. The newest latest technology purchased by a government official who wont be on the sub with you?
Glad to see that US News is being read by such enthusiastic readers. To enlighten your little debate, I suggest visiting the homepage of the electrical engineer who came up with the smart grid idea in the first place.
http://central.tli.umn.edu/
And for more on hacking, have a look here:
http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/events/cyber2010
Cheers,
Alex Kingsbury
Alex Kingsbury
Associate Editor, National Security
U.S. News & World Report
1050 Thomas Jefferson St., NW
Washington, D.C.
20007-3837
akingsbury@usnews.com
I’ll deal in more depth with the hacking issue in the next installment, but as far as Dr. Amin’s resume goes, he’s dealing with security issues, and not the load-leveling aspect that the “smart grid” is commonly referring to. What he was researching at EPRI was technology that was internal to the utility grids themselves and had nothing to do with how this would impact consumers. And it most certainly didn’t have anything to do efficiency.
Please try to understand details. They’re very important.
“These details however, will be between you and your local utility unless the federal government chooses to insert itself into the rulemaking.”
What are the odds that the federal government would do that? I’m betting nearly 100%, regardless of which party is in power.
“If implemented with a high degree of participation (a very big ‘if’), this kind of load shifting could allow more users to be served with the same equipment.”
Which is an efficiency, of a sort: more complete utilization of existing capacity is one way efficiency is measured.
It’s also a measure of inflexibility. When you try to maximize utilization, you minimize your ability to change. In “Slack”, DeMarco and Lister discuss how maximized utilization can be taken to extremes as an efficiency measure. If you measured a highway’s efficiency by how much of the highway was in use at a given time, you would get your “best” score by filling it with cars, 100%. We call that a traffic jam, and it’s not efficient.
In the power grid, a traffic jam scenario doesn’t make sense, of course; but I have to wonder if more complete utilization increases our vulnerability to power losses. If we’re carefully squeezing the slack out of the grid, then if we lose part of the grid, there’s no slack to cover the loss.
Yes, high utilization increases vulnerability. Load shifting might help this marginally, but there needs to be reasonable excess capacity in both generation and transmission. Certain places, such as California, are cutting this too closely, especially on the generation side. In 2000, they had severe problems (remember “Greyout Davis”?) and the backup sources that they were used to relying on in the PNW also had hydropower problems due to a very dry winter. California’s problem became Seattle’s problem.
GE wants to make billions. They sold the generators to the coal burners. They want to sell new generator sets with wind turbines and sell new geneators hooked to natural gas burners for back up. GE will make billions more if they can get the goal burners shut down. GE WIND is the old Enron wind. “Smart grid” is a social concept. If it is new or green friendly it is labeled as “smart”. The new sources want a grid provided by the gubment so they do not have gathering or tranmission costs. “Smart grid” is also coupled with structuring delivery toward off peak times so there ae less brown outs. Wind turbines and solar are both very expensive and very eratic. Would you buy a car that ran at speed limit 20% of the time and often didn’t run at all? A 1 million dollar turbine often will do nothing. Sometimes it’s output may be low or even very low.
Some utilities for years have been installing remote controlled radio switches on electric water heaters and electric air conditioning systems to defer their peak load power for an hour or two. Motorola was selling these switches in the 1970′s, and I believe there are similar schemes, today. I know that the economics of operating a power utility have not changed that much since then.
As a former electric utility engineer, I fail to see where an intelligent electric power network can achieve any efficiencies over the present networks. You DO NOT want to connect all the local power companies across the US into one network, thereby creating the probability of a true national power outage. This would be just dumb.
Time of day metering makes real economic sense because the electric power company does not have to take overt control over your home appliances. I know I would spend a little more for a programmable thermostat, and would make sure all appliances were off when not used.
All engineers know that Efficiency is the enemy of Reliability;
Politicans could not care less, they just want somebody else
to pay for the improved service, and take the blame when it
breaks down:
The Friendship of Chums
The Love of your Wife
or a new piano’s tune;
Which of the three will you trust
at the end of an Indian June ?
– R. Kipling
There is no money to pay for improvements, so the inevitable breakdowns
need to be limited in scope by _decentralizing_ the existing grids to
the degree practical, to prevent cascading failures.
P.S. It is no accident that Texas is not tied in to the other grids.
Problem is as a consumer I see the “smart grid” as a kind of “heads we win, tails you (the consumer) lose” situation.
The power company up by my dad’s had this “second power meter for the water heater” kind of deal, but they (the power company) got rid of it.
Now the power company wants to promote a “time-of-day” type of metering. There are modest savings for using power from 11 PM-11 AM and a huge boost in price to use power during “peak times”, which appears to be the 12 hours from 11 AM to 11 at night. One would have had to (inconveniently) shift a large amount of power use to just break even. I advised Dad to say “Thanks, but no thanks” to this “deal.”
Smart meters are about control.
It’s about turning off YOUR electricity when someone else feels its necessary for society.
And building new powerplants or even retaining old ones is simply not on their agenda.
Only “green” electricity will be allowed, and there won’t be much of it.
In the age of prosperity, electricity, like water and sewer utilities were available 100% of the time, to everyone.
In the age of post-prosperity sought by the greens, only the powerful elite will retain 100% available utilities.
Everyone else will be forced to sacrifice to the green religion belief that less is more.
Which really means that less for you means more for them.
And the smug moral superiority that comes with liberal Robin Hoodism.
Turning off YOUR power makes Al Gore and his wannabes feel better about themselves.
I think you missed one of the major interconnects.
There is Texas, Eastern, Western, and the interconnect for Al Gore’s mansion, Black Hole Plantation.
This idiocy was debunked on LGF
Sorry, but “It’s wrong because Charles says so” is not debunking.
Is that you Charles?
Having worked as a consulting engineer for WAPA some years ago I am familiar with many of the issues spoken (well, written) about in this article. There have been some really excellent comments not to mention the article itself. It amazes me some the things I failed to consider about the entire “Smart Grid” fantasy and how much we forget when we are not current in the industry.
Does it strike anyone how much this whole “Smart Grid” push is similar to what has happened with the Health Care disaster foisted on us by “O” and his sycophants on the left?
Larry, I am more on the finance and supply side of the business for water metering. However, on the website I gave you there is contact information and you may have some luck. Overall I agree with you that it is not a great threat as the engineers in Raleigh have done their homework. Disconnect switches are an important part of metering now a days, especially in cases where it is very dangerous to have to go in and cut someone’s service.
Yeah, I’m sure “Pajamas Media” is a good source. Umm, let’s see what Barclays said in a 3/1 Barron’s piece by Mike Hogan – smart grid spending could reach $40b/year by 2015, compared w/ less than $10b today, by 2030 it could grow to $100b. One Cisco exec said it would “eclipse the internet as a business opportunity for Cisco.”
Here’s an advancement – Demand Response (DR). It allows customers to reduce power use during peak demand in return for price breaks.
The bottom line is that the “smart grid” is very likely to cost you more. Despite the modern conveniences of this age, I’m glad that I grew up when this country was still free and the commissars in Washington didn’t have their fingers in everyone’s pockets. America is becoming a third world country thanks to its own stupidity.
This notion that people shouldn’t pay more for when they use electricity is like community rating for healthcare(why do you think it was one of BO’s central tenets in his plan?). Nobody wants to pay what something is actually costing. I would love if my power company offered me a chance to pay different rates for use at different times of the day. We as consumers need to pay what things are actually costing, in order for market mechanisms to actually work. Of course, with power, they are not free market, rather, a highly regulated entity.