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The power grid is a network. Let's treat it like one.
Visualize the Internet as if it had been designed by IBM circa 1965 - millions of dumb terminals hardwired to central mainframes, download requests hung up by queuing glitches at Univac Southwest, and email knocked out because some lead-footed backhoe operator in Cleveland nicked a T3 line. That's pretty much what the electricity grid, the most complex network ever built, looks like today.
The mainframes of energy are 1,000-megawatt coal and nuclear power stations, and the dumb terminals are every appliance in your house. The fragility of this centralized architecture was demonstrated anew in August when the lights went out for 50 million people in the Northeast. Like the blackouts of 1965 and 1977, this most recent cascading failure was greeted by ritual exorcisms of partisan finger-pointing, followed by the formation of committees.
But a powerful idea has been brewing in energy circles for more than a decade that could unite Democrats and Republicans, hard-line solar advocates, and homeland security pundits: Make the grid more like the Internet by supplementing it with networks that generate power locally. This idea, called distributed generation, is our energy future, but it was sidetracked as the White House settled accounts with drill-happy campaign contributors. The new grid is on its way because market forces will demand it.
The cheapest power boost comes from reducing energy waste. One of the biggest offenders is the grid itself, which bleeds off 7 percent of the power shipped across it as heat. Establishing sources of energy closer to users means less waste. It also means higher-quality electricity. The grid's complexity increased exponentially due to wholesale energy trading, which stirs up disturbances in power flow that must be cleaned up on the user end. The price tag of power-conditioning equipment alone at a Nasdaq center in Connecticut was two-thirds of the cost of building the whole facility. A survey by the Electric Power Research Institute estimates the annual loss in the US from power outages and fluctuations at $100 billion - 50 cents for every dollar spent on electricity.
Much of the technology needed to build the distributed-energy network already exists. New photovoltaic arrays filter disturbances out of the grid while contributing their own energy, which peaks when demand is highest - on sultry days when blackouts loom. And distribution of resources will make the system rebound faster when something goes wrong, so the next time a line goes down in Ohio, Broadway won't go black.
Post-9/11, the Bush administration's resolve to subsidize more coal and nuclear plants in the name of tightening "energy security" seems disingenuous - and deeply flawed. Smaller power sources can be brought online in months, not decades, and make less-attractive targets. Future generations of terrorists may thank us if the Yucca Mountain dump site is approved - it's potentially the world's first plutonium mine.
The electricity industry is a classic example of a market ripe for breakout disruptive technologies. A DuPont engineer joked recently that if his company could design a fuel cell that looked like an iBook, everyone would want one. What's needed is a new set of standards, so that those who want to roll their own electrons can plug and play.
The grid was a good idea 100 years ago. So good that we were able to graft a much more resilient network - the Internet - on top of it. It's time for the grid to learn what the Net already knows.
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