Smart Grid Transitions

Is this the future?

2009-06-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

RPS (renewable portfolio standards) and other measures are pushing a more complex mix of energy sources onto the grid. These sources all require more intricate management than the conventional combination of base load (usually coal/hydro nuclear) and dispatchable (usually combined cycle natural gas) generation. We've been tracking a number of software and sensor providers, but this is new. Rather than try to grow a new generation of IT savvy technologists, Duke Energy outsources the grid management to Integral Analytics, a relatively new startup. It is only a pilot project, but I think we should watch this closely.

Smart Grid in the main stream media - not bad!

2009-06-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

This story on yahoo is the second big mainstream Smart Grid story I've seen in the last couple weeks. I was initially concerned that it had the same flavor as this Wall Street Journal article from a few weeks back, but the tone is mostly positive. The Yahoo article seemed to be sticking to the 'fair and balanced' mandate of including some negativity at the end of the piece. Interestingly, the negativity seems to have converged on the following: The utilities are going to charge us for the priveledge of charging us more. The utilities are rolling out Smart Meters, at some cost which the public will absorb. These will allow the utilities to more closely monitor consumption patterns, and charge customers more. Most experts agree that the real story is that capital investment is unavoidable, the question is where will it go? New generation or better efficiency tools like smart metering? My concern is that most of the demonstration projects I'm hearing about seem focused on residential customers. Advanced Metering is a pretty complex concept for non-technorati. It seems better targeted for professionally managed facilities. These could include residences, but I'd rather see a professionally managed apartment complex than a single-family home.

Spotlight on Storage

2009-06-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Storage for the Smart Grid has definitely been on the radar lately. Several recent articles have brought this sector into the forground. We start with a bold statement of market growth. A total of $4B is not huge, but 10x growth in a decade is nothing to sneeze at. The details are here, but I don't think it counts PHEV batteries as part of 'grid storage'.

On the technical side, the Electicity Storage Association has a great overview of storage methods, as well as significant players in each.

Oracle on the move

2009-05-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

Oracle has recently announced that it will offer 'end-to-end' smart grid software. This has had the desired effect of making all of us thinking about small companies nervous. I did some digging, and Oracle has certainly been brewing this for a while. First, for those of use who only know (& 'love') their DB products, Oracle has been in the apps business for a while, most notably with the acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004, and mostly through acquisitions.

There are a couple of acquisitions behind this announcement: SPL Worldgroup was acquired in 2006 and LodeStar in 2007. SPL is described as a billing management company, and LodeStart does advanced meter data managment. So those look like the pieces: more sophisticated, context sensitive billing based on more sophisticated meter data. The actual smart meters come from somebody else. Of course, all the data gets stored in big Oracle databases. All that's lacking is a big splashy demo like GE-Cisco's Miami Smart Grid.

With an identically worded announcement from Trilliant, it appears we can expect an behemoth newcomer vs nimble insider showdown in the near future.

I thought a trillion dollars for the whole thing was a lot!

2009-05-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

A recent news article really caught my eye. In a previous post, I pointed to a white paper that estimates grid infrastructure upgrades at upwards of a trillion dollars. That certainly seems like a huge sum, and really caught my eye as a bold statement of market size. Here's a company, Mainstream Renewable Power, that's talking about $1.5T for a single project. How does that work? Is this just marketing to create a buzz, establish an expectation of trillions in order to make billions seem cheap? I will keep an eye on this to see whether the story has legs.

TCN CleanTech Capital Program - Premium Energy?

2009-05-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

I attended the TCN CleanTech Capital Program on Tuesday, May 5th. Several brief observations:

There are amazing resources for entrepreneurs. TCN has several relevant events in addition to this one. One of the panelists, Dr. Linda Plano, is a member of the Mass Technology Transfer Center. She sponsors a CleanTech specific conference, among other relevant activities.
You want to be on the demand side of the business unless you can figure out how to get a multibillion dollar credit line. All the panelists agreed that 'demand side' refers to energy conservation, demand response, and energy monitoring - both low capital AND lightly regulated. The only play on the supply side is as a small supplier. Second Wind was highlighted as a company with a relatively low capital, short sales cycle product and thus had a chance as a startup amongst the behemoths.
The most interesting exchange of the evening occured between a panelist and a telecom alumni interested in transitioning to CleanTech. The topic was the expected lifetime of capital equipment in the energy space. The conventional wisdom is to expect a 40 year lifecycle. The telecom alumni pointed out that this was the expectation in telecom as well, back in the scratchy voice over copper days; the situation changed drastically; the same can be true in CleanTech. The panelist countered that telecom upgrades were driven by a vast array of new high-value services: voicemail, sms, mobile, etc, but that watts were watts.

So, today's question to ponder: truth or lack of vision? Is there some value added in energy that will drive the kind of short product cycles that make for a booming industry, or are we talking a one-time changeover from fossil fuel to renewables, and then we're done?

IERG International CleanTech Panel 2009

2009-04-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

the International Executives Resource Group (IERG) hosted a CleanTech Panel discussion on April 27th at Choate Hall & Stuart LLP. IERG is a general interest organization, accordingly the panel was targeted to a non-specialist audience. My interest was peaked by two panelists from GreatPoint Energy, a provider of 'clean coal' technology. As my use of quotes indicates, I am at best lukewarm about the role that coal has to play in CleanTech. I do try to be open minded, and was hoping to better understand the technological reasons for coal's place at the 'green' table. Here's what I got out of the panel:

If there is a technological argument for coal gassification as a GHG reduction tool, the panelists did not make it. One of the few positives I will give coal is that MIT is engaging in a Carbon Sequestration intitiative, and the default position is that MIT research initiatives are technically sound.
The panelists observed that especially in this (economic) climate, it is hard to get funding for billion dollar mega-projects. Overall, the panel was receptive to the idea of these efforts being US government sponored. The least public sector friendly individuals both on the panel and in the audience at a minimum conceeded that the Europeans, Chinese and Indian governments will almost certainly fund these mega projects. The chances of US industry and US jobs coming out of these non-US efforts are pretty low.
There was significant discussion about the state of stimulus funding. The consensus was that a number of 'Cleantech' sectors have been identified as recipients of stimulus money, but that no one was sure what the next step was, as well as which of the huge array of federal programs was going to be the ideal stimulus delivery vehicle. In this light, news about the Miami Smart Grid initiative takes on greater interest. I've read a number of articles on this. All refer to 'expectation of stimulus money' but no one explains beyond that statement. Do the players (all large fortune 500's) know something the rest of us don't? Can they afford to take a chance that the stimulus money either will not come or will come late?

MassTLC "Building the Smart Grid" Event

2009-04-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

the panel discussion "Building the Smart Grid: Barriers and Opportunities" continued a tradition of top-notch events hosted by New England technology enablers, this time the MassTLC (technology leadership council) Energy Event. The format of the meeting was an early (7:30 am) start for 30 minutes of networking prior to the 2 hour panel discussion. The panel featured two fortune 500 smartgrid suppliers, two large utilities, and and interested third party. Each speaker gave a very brief 5 minute talk and the floor was opened to questions. The Q&A format had some intriguing undercurrents as it essentially featured a group of established players being peppered by questions from upstart outsiders looking for an angle into this space. Since my original posting, MassTLC has posted a summary of the conference here.

Although brief, each speaker's presentation exposed their institutions thinking and led to additional information, which I will share in this post. As has been my tradition with posts longer than a paragraph, the executive summary is:

IBM is pushing WebSphere through their membership in GridWise and has had some major installations by third party contractors.
GE is implementing with their iFIX SCADA, which does not seem very enterprise compatible.
NSTAR is dipping a toe in the water and hopes to use existing broadband infrastructure of its mostly urban / suburban client base.
National Grid has a fairl large-scale deployment but seems to believe that residential customers need to drive adoption.
Finally, the City of Boston has a remarkably forward thinking approach that puts my seemingly high tech hometown of Cambridge to shame.

Guido Bartells of IBM spoke in passing of Malta as the first Smart Grid country, and stressed his involvement with the Gridwise consortium. Malta is in fact and IBM project, completed with engineering from Enemlta Corp. Ivolvement by a large company in a standards initiative is often motivated by interest in maintaining compatibility of an existing product to a new application area. A search of WebSphere and Smart Grid uncovered that in fact, a large number of the high profile smartgrid projects are being built on this. Most revealing are the presentations by , a 3rd party engineering firm. Perhaps we have the making of IBM's business model: the IBM core team makes sure that standards compatible with their technology are enacted and makes money licensing its software to 3rd parties who build custome solutions on top of it.

Sunil Sharan of GE used the term "next generation scada" as part of a surprisingly superficial discussion of the topic. It turns out that the phrase is used in the marketing literature for GE Fanuc's iFIX, the former Intellution product. Some additional research uncovered substantial smart grid applications built on this platform. I'm a pretty weak SCADA guy, so I'm still trying to determine whether a 'WebSphere SmartGrid' competes with an 'iFix smartgrid' or whether they cover different abstraction levels. It may be that SCADA is 'inside the walls' while webshpere is 'outside the wall'. It is difficult to determine the extent to which a hardware company like GE is commited to a largely software initiative like Smart Grid, especially when so much of the early value proposition centers around cost savings - ie buying fewer GE turbines. I have been associated with several companies who have tried to augment software offereing with features intended to enhance the value of the company's hardware. These have met with mixed results.

Larry Gelbien of NSTAR gave a great demand response statistic, at least for the NorthEast. In our climate 'problematic peak demand' occurs 4 to 8 days a year in 2 two four hour periods each day. It would be very interesting to determine how this compares to hotter climates, as well as different generation mix. Larry talked about his preferred communications backbone for smart grid - the customer's broadband connection. The idea behind this is cost savings for NSTAR, but I have to say I'm not sure how this would be implemented. Say I have DSL and NSTAR taps into my DSL for my SmartGrid. What happens when I switch to cable modem? Do I go through the same hassle I went through when my alarm system phone line stopped working? The cable company says 'that's the n-star box, I won't touch it'? I guess I'm incentivised to make sure my smartgrid box is working because I want my savings. Hmmm.

Bruce Walker of National Grid talked about the largest SmartGrid pilot in Mass, 15,000 homes in Worcester. Bruce's presentation gave me the impression that National Grid viewed modernization of electrification as a customer demand to be met rather than a new business model to be exploited. Although this was only one talk by one individual, it certainly sounded like the thinking of an entrenched player. I suspect that I was not the only outsider in the audience who saw an opportunity to respond more enthusiastically to this opening.

Bill Oates is the CIO of the City of Boston. I will take advantage of the looseness of the blog format and say I liked him best. He seemed to have a clear vision of the role technology can play in keeping his city near the top of the 'desireability index' and seemed to really understand the way SmartGrid integrates into the goal of increased energy from renewables, as well as electrifed transportation. He talked about how the city was trying to leverage its BroadBand stimulus money to achieve the dual goal of increased internet as well as smartgrid penetration. As a Cambridge resident and volunteer in my city's energy useage committee, I felt a certain parochial jealousy, that someone from my city wasn't giving this talk.

"Smart" Grid Security "Breach"

2009-04-16T10:39:00.001-07:00

When the Wall Street Journal reports on Smart Grid, people pay attention. I've been mulling this topic for a few days, and am prepared to give it my best non-security expert shot. I think there are three basic points related to this topic:

1) Life is full of tradeoffs: want security? give up connectivity
2) Why is this a story?: This isn't even Smart Grid - this is 'regular grid'
3) What is the state of the art? People are hard at work on Smart Grid security - what are they doing?

Tradeoffs -

My experience with security comes from our Semiconductor industry data acquisition and control product. We find that we have two very different customers, and we can almost never make them both happy. Our direct customers, who use our product, want as much interconnectivity as possible. The IT organization whose job it is to maintain security want as little as possible. Others may achieve a better balance of security and access than we do, but the tradeoff seems ever present. We are just one little company, but reading one of the great security evangelists, Bruce Schneier gives me confidence that we are seeing the same thing everybody experiences. There is value to be had from the greater connectivity proposed in the smart grid. This value goes well beyond the 'laziness' of not having to go on-site to throw a switch. The power of automation and large aggregated data analysis has been proven in countless fields and will be demonstrated on the smart grid as well. This power comes at a cost. More access means more vulnerabilties. Vulnerabilites get exploited, whether by nefarious agents or bored teen-agers. It hasn't stopped poople from moving ot online banking, and it won't stop this either.

Why is this in the news?

This aspect of the story is fascinating. The first thing to note is that the WSJ article says nothing about smart grid. It merely states that utility grid has been attacked. Secondary sources have augmented this story to focus on SmartGrid. The next aspect of the story is the vagueness of the article. Inteligence officials state 'Chinese' and 'Russian' 'cyberspies' have penetrated our utility grid. When? How significantly? What constitutes the electrical grid? What makes the 'cyberspies' 'Chinese' or 'Russian'? Who are these officials? A number of commentators have picked up these threads. I will try to summarize and augment. Computers get 'botted' all the time. The BBC did a story on how you could buy a 20000 computer botnet for $0.25 a machine. So given the number of computers that get hacked, what attribute of a computer is required for it to be 'part of the grid'? Is it on somebody's desk & mostly used for email & powerpoint? Could I use the 'botted machine to play Enron energy trader? A while back there was a story that NSA got hacked - the PR department! What makes the attacks 'chinese' - a chinese IP? Any hacker worth anything routs through a bunch of secondary IP's- China is a very popular pass-through. Unnamed 'intelligence officials' can be in the disinformation business as easily as the info business. A theory is that the NSA is agitating for more control over cybersecurity. To quote Bruce Schneier twice in one post, he's convinced this story is a plant as well.

What is the state of the art?

One of my favorite podcasts, Currents, had a show on grid security. A key point that I took away is that cyberterrorism is pretty darn inefficient. Hacking the grid is hard, and almost anything you do can be undone fairly easily. By contrast, the physical infrastructure is not enormously well protected, and a very small number of very low-level people can really do some damage destroying physical switches and relays that take months to replace. Bottom line, much less sexy attacks are a much greater risk to infrastructure. A further point is that every serious smartgrid organization has studied security intensely and has proposed detailed. This is now the point in the post where my lack of security background comes through. I can't tell you whether the proposes approach is sound, or best of breed, but security has definitely been a serious consideration in SmartGrid.

Independent of the facts, I think this story highlights the critical PR challenge that this new technology faces. Let's hope the Smart Grid isn't Tesla to the the status quo's Edison.

Breaking Analysis - Smart Grid Security Breach

2009-04-14T09:55:00.001-07:00

When the Wall Street Journal reports on Smart Grid, people pay attention. There has been a lot of buzz about this article. I am still trying to make some sense of it. My initial impressions are:

1) Want security? give up connectivity
2) This isn't even Smart Grid - this is 'regular grid'
3) People are hard at work on Smart Grid security - what are they doing?

April is Smart Grid Month on Inside RE

2009-04-11T12:28:00.001-07:00

Inside Renewable Energy, a great podcast and one of my key news sources, has just started a month-long series on the Smart Grid. Kudos to EnerNOC for landing the lead story.

If you haven't picked up the podcast habit, I highly recommend it. What an easy way to learn! Inside RE is one of the podcasts on my 'CleanTech Podcasts' tab in the middle of my page.

hack-a-watt - a homemade HAN testbed on a shoestring

2009-04-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

Finally, I get to do a technology post!

A while back, a colleague was telling me about their interest in prototyping some HAN (Home Automation Network) concepts as quickly and easily as possible. As a control guy, that got me thinking about the simplest sensor-controller-actuator I could configure. The Kill-a-Watt can measure power consumption, but is fairly useless as a sensor that integrates into a controller. However, a little web searching uncovered twittering-kill-a-watt, showing you how to graft an XBEE radio on your device. On the actuator side, you've got x10, which gives you the software controlled switches, as well as a PC program to control them.

Now the missing piece is interfacing the sensor and control. Amazingly enough, there seems to be an API out there for the X10. I know very little about XBEE, but it seems to be a standard implementation of ZigBee, and I didn't have any troubling finding open-source toolkits out there. So there it is ... Less than $100 in HW, and a little soldering, and you can cycle your Fridge compressor off when your dishwasher goes onto 'dry' cycle, dropping peak load by an imperceptible amount.

The Trillion Dollar Pot of Gold

2009-04-09T13:05:00.001-07:00

Many of the sectors I've researched feature the 'Pot of Gold' paper. This is usually an article by a reputable research firm that presents a careful, factually based top-down estimate of the potential size of the market. Ideally, the report contains a one-line nugget about 'x number of consumers @ $y per consumer' or 'the total market is (this massive amount), all we need is (this minute % penetration) and we're all rich.The one-liner then gets picked up by more mainstream media and drives interest for years to come. This report from the Edision Foundation seems to be the paper for the Utility industry. The key line from the executive summary is:

"By 2030, the electric utility industry will need to make a total infrastructure investment of $1.5 trillion to $2.0 trillion. The entire U.S. electric utility industry will require investment on the order of $1.5 trillion under the RAP Efficiency Base Case Scenario. The cost could increase to $2.0 trillion under the Prism RAP Scenario"

I don't think there is an official breakdown of the spending between various categories. I have seen other sources that state that only half of that amount is new generation, leaving up to a trillion dollars for transmission & distribution. I have not seen an explicit one-liner about Smart Grid potential in this report, but a number of sources seem to be agreeing that generation is by far the most expensive way to meet demand, so all 'smart grid' based demand-management scenarios will seem cost effective when compared to the massive numbers being considered for new generation. ok - I'm going make the buzz phrase, and see how it flies:

"all 'smart grid' based demand-management scenarios will seem cost effective when compared to the massive numbers being considered for new generation"

What is the Smart Grid?

2009-04-05T08:34:00.001-07:00

Defining terms is a natural place to begin any endeavor. This post presents my take on the Smart Grid, ideally with just the right balance of authority and controversy to kick off my blog with a lively discussion. Since it is longer than I would like, I'll summarize to save you the trouble of reading it: Because the smart grid doesn't exist, 'Smart Grid' is a key marketing term needed to catalyze its development. As the actual physical entity takes shape, I claim that there will be three progressively increasing levels of sophistication and capability. The simplest is Demand Response, already in place to a large extent. At mid-complexity is 'Smart Grid + Storage' - limited to a few pilot projects, notably Smart Grid City in Boulder CO. At its most developed is 'Smart Grid Enabled Distributed Generation', where 'Distributed' is used in the conventional sense of closer to the load, but also to refer to Transmission Line Superhighways and their associated control that enable generation a much further distance from the load. Of course, this piece is based on many sources, a number of which are in my bookmarks.

The Smart Grid is both critical enabling technology for re-energizing the world and a somewhat empty marketing phrase. Good marketing is essential for realizing a complex concept, so lets take apart 'smart grid' the marketing phrase. Calling it a Smart Grid of course implies that the present grid is dumb. Like all good marketing, this overstates the case. Electricity delivery is far more reliable than internet or mobile phone service, two darlings of the High Tech era. To a large extent this reliability is the result of an extremely well engineered, if un-sexy, control system. The grid is already pretty darn smart. However the end customer, either commercial or residential, is the recipient of electricity devoid of production cost information. The consumer uses the last watt that tips millions of people into a blackout no differently and at no different price than they use power from the utility's excess capacity that effectively has no incremental cost. This permits an extreme level of inefficiency, requiring vastly more generation capacity than a 'smarter' scenario would enable. This 'smart layer' allows better pricing, forecasting, control and in the end more efficient, greener and more cost-effective energy for all players. Since the completed smart grid is an immense and extraordinarily complex infrastructure project that is still largely in the concept stage, a good marketing campaign is critical. People from the President of the United States to the most technologically unsophisticated of end consumer need to be aware of the smart grid and need to "want one of those" for the complete vision to be executed. We knew the internet was hot when we were poking along on 4 KBPS dial-up, sending occasional plain text emails. Ten years later, we stream video on demand and happily pay our $60/month. The same progression is required with smart grid.

If the Smart Grid "lights don't come on until the whole thing is wired", there will be neither the patience nor the capital to complete the project. For adoption to occur there needs to be a valuable technology solution at incremental levels of sophistication and build out.There is some debate as to what those levels are and I offer my opinion. From a technology standpoint, Smart Grid is motivated by a combination of three factors. An inefficient marketplace, a very large step function in marginal cost due to the relative cost of peak load to base load, and finally, the poor base load characteristics for most renewables. The simplest Smart Grid strategy, demand response, focuses on improving market efficiency. At a mid-level of complexity, storage allows peak demand to be met at lower cost. At the most sophisticated level, a large-scale physical infrastructure allows far more efficient incorporation of renewables by enabling generation that is both much further from the load and much closer. Let's look at each of these scenarios.

There is near universal agreement that the present US electricity market is inefficient, meaning that the cost of providing energy is not accurately reflected in its price (energy prices are fixed, energy costs are highly variable). Economists would say that there is a sharp step function in the marginal cost of electricity when supply moves from base load to peak load. Since the consumer pays a constant rate, there is currently no incentive to reduce peak load consumption. "Base Load", somewhat confusingly, is used to refer to generation (not load) resources that are used to meet the minimum energy requirement of the demand cycle. In warm industrial climates, the demand cycle is roughly a year, with minimum at winter nights and maximum at hot weekdays. A key feature of base load is that it is essentially fixed output. Turning base load on and off and even varying it is extremely costly. As a result, when consumption is below base load levels, marginal cost is essentially zero or negative. If not all of the produced power is consumed, it must be shunted and re-routed, at some cost. There is no reason to reduce consumption below base load levels. The situation changes dramatically when consumption rises above base load levels. "Peak Load" refers to generation capability that can be brought on line to meet varying requirements. Peak load generation typically has extremely high fixed and variable costs. The variable cost of operation is higher due to the lower efficiency of variable generation systems, but the fixed costs are truly staggering. Millions of dollars of inventory sit idle and depreciate to meet that one hottest day of the year that drives peak demand. Forecasting future demand presents the most extreme marginal cost scenario. Utilities are often in a position of anticipating that an additional power plant, on the order of a billion dollar investment will be needed to meet as little as hours a year of peak demand anticipated at some point in the future. Despite the varying cost, price is fixed. Customers pay the same whether the utility has tremendous over-capacity and would be producing power even if it weren't consumed, or whether supply is so strained that the utility needs to bring non-compliant generation needs on line, at the cost of massive pollution fines.

At its most basic, the Smart Grid brings price transparency through demand response. The most compelling business case for demand response centers on peak load forecasting. Peak electricity demand is growing faster than supply. Most utilities forecast needing new billion-dollar generation facilities to meet future peak demand. Many have already begun the financing and permitting process. As discussed previously, peak demand is extremely rare and surprisingly easy to reduce. With the right financial incentives, it is easy to secure contracts to reduce demand. The simplest scenario involves raising office temperature a few degrees, only when the need is critical. Typically a third party acts as a middleman and arranges for demand reduction that keeps total load within acceptable parameters. The Utility communicates a request for a certain amount of demand reduction (the company EnerNOC coined the great term 'negawatts'). The Demand Response provider communicates the request to participating consumers. The participating facility raises its thermostat a few degrees. Office workers roll up their shirt sleeves and get paid a bonus for their trouble. The utility is happy to pay for this service rather than for new generating capacity. The consumers have made their own ROI calculations and concluded that selling negawatts is worth more than using the power, and enough is left over for the Demand Response provider to profit as well.

Most observers agree that there is a limit to demand elasticity - there is only so much you can reduce consumption. In the end, businesses produce widgets, not negawatts, and people want to be comfortable. This serves as the lead-in to Smart Grid with Storage. Essentially, load varies on a very short and quite reliable schedule. In warm, industrialized areas peak load is weekday afternoons (when businesses are online and cooling demand is at a maximum), and nighttime loads are a small fraction of peak. The ability to store a modest amount of energy for a short period of time becomes extremely valuable. Typically, this problem separates into two businesses. Storage hardware is one, the other is the necessary 'smarts' to both monetize and control the energy flow (when to store energy, when to draw energy down). This added layer of complexity has the advantage of requiring less behavior modification from end consumers. Phoenix businesses can still keep their offices at 68F in July, they just cool them using ice stored overnight, rather than a compressor running at peak demand time.

The final level of sophistication involves expanding the generation range - generating both closer to and further from the load. It is the most ambitious from the capital investment perspective, but most experts feel that it is an essential component to any significant RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard - a mandated percent of electicity from renewables). The need for expanded generation range is best understood by considering Wind and Solar renewables.

Efficient use of Wind requires longer distance transmission because the wind blows when it feels like it, and mostly where nobody lives. The best US wind resources are in the sparsely populated Great Planes, as well as far offshore. Furthermore, wind is a highly variable resource, but the larger the areas of aggregation, the smoother the average production. To illustrate: The wind at the McCamey, TX 4 GW facility in the Texas Panhandle ranges from gale force to still, independent of the needs of consumers. By contrast, average wind across a thousand mile radius of the Great Plains is much steadier. These scenarios combine to require transmission over far greater distances than is currently built or maybe even feasible. In addition to this massive physical infrastructure, 'Smart Grid' inter connectivity over a far greater physical distance and number of components than is presently the state of the art is required to draw energy from where the wind is blowing, forecast where it needs to come from next, and deploy peak load resources as needed. The technical challenges to this wider area of control are substantial, and this represents the boldest, longest term vision of Smart Grid.

Efficient use of solar power requires nearly the opposite configuration. Unlike wind, Solar PV's (PhotoVoltaic - Solar Cells) greatest asset is that in warm climates, it tracks peak load (Peak cooling is needed when the sun shines brightest, providing the most Solar PV electricity). This advantage overcomes its (so far) higher cost, but only if solar power is efficiently distributed near the demand. The peak load advantage of Solar is attenuated if not lost when Solar PV is generated at the utility scale, then transmitted with the usual inefficiencies to its destination. Solar PV is remarkably well suited to the suburban sprawl of much of America's sunbelt. Between single story big-box stores and their acres of parking lots, gigawatts of generation await siting. The best use of the PV panels shading the Costco or Walmart parking lot is at that store. Achieving this goal requires significant hardware infrastructure in addition to PV generation, as well as a major 'Smart Grid' component to enable two-way flow of power. Simply stated, the store will still need full AC 30 minutes after the clouds roll in and cut PV production 50% (external supply needs to be bought). Likewise, weekday mid-afternoon is a slow time for retailers, and the store may decide there is more money to be made selling power than keeping its 3 customers at a comfortable temperature. (Excess capacity needs to be sold).

The above progression describes a massive change of a huge, tightly regulated, and fundamentally conservative industry. There are many who believe this Titanic is too big to turn. Others, me included, see utilities largely analogous to Ma Bell in the mid-80's - poised on the brink of a complete, end-to-end overhaul. In 1989, if I had an incredibly tech-savvy editor, I might have been able to connect to their mainframe via modem to write this article. Today, there is no reason I couldn't be posting from my BlackBerry overlooking Cape Cod bay (actually, there is, it's cold and rainy on the bay today). Technology moves at a phenomenal pace, and I'm betting my career that it's coming to Smart Grid next.