What Keeps Electric Power So Dirty?

We spend a lot of time talking about clean energy, but the U.S. electric power industry still pumps more than a billion pounds of toxins into the environment annually, as well as 40 percent of all our greenhouse gases. So when a colleague of mine asked for input on putting together a panel discussion for a technical conference on advanced power-grid architectures, I happily responded with the letter below. I hope you like it!

Dear Tony,

Great to hear from you, and thanks for thinking of me in the context of the power-grid architecture discussion. As you know, it’s one of my favorite topics!

I think it might be a lot more interesting if, in addition to the technical discussion, you ask the panelists what they believe to be the drivers of technical innovation. For example, instead of just asking, “What does an advanced grid architecture look like?”, you might also ask, “How did we end up, after more than 100 years of development and billions of dollars of research, with an architecture that delivers just 30 percent of the energy in the fuel it consumes?”

I’m not suggesting by any means that panelists should be made to recount the sordid, criminal pasts of Samuel Insull and J.P. Morgan. What I’m saying is that it has not worked well up to this point to set technical goals and then hope that our social, economic, and environmental values will be upheld as a result. It makes much more sense to go about it the other way: set forth the values, establish rules to encourage and reward businesses for honoring them, and let innovation and entrepreneurism drive the technological direction that best advances the values. It’s an old-school conservative approach, true?

It’s beginning to happen, but it only works as well as the values we set forth, and we therefore have to be very specific about what we are trying to accomplish. If we decide we value having lots of distributed resources on the grid, we may end up with that, but it may or may not produce a desirable result.

Denmark has done a pretty good job advancing its values with its power grid. Ten years ago, the Danish government decided that the best way to foster entrepreneurism, innovation, and resource efficiency was to make the transmission system public and re-write it’s charter. The new charter gave every Danish citizen the right, upon connection to the power grid, to upload as well as download, and it required the highest possible end-to-end operating efficiency. They accelerated the process using feed-in tariffs, and the flood of interconnects necessitated development of the active architecture they use now.

If we learn from the Danish model and add to it the value of local self-reliance, it will probably lead to an architecture you described to me years ago:  a network of microgrids wherein each one can island itself whenever it’s beneficial to do so, or re-close with the larger system whenever that is more beneficial.

How do we get there? Again, one could better ask, “Why are we not there?” It’s because the power industry continues to insist that active participation of DR in grid support is dangerous to linemen, that high DG penetration leads to instability, and that plug-and-play interoperability isn’t viable because they need discretion over every interconnect. Those positions are less and less credible all the time. Remember when big tobacco used to claim that their research showed smoking wasn’t harmful, but when we finally took a look it turned out they had been lying for decades to protect their industry?

I’m quite sure you don’t want to stray into a racketeering discussion at an IEEE conference – I’m just showing the futility of waxing technological about an industry that is less efficient now than when it started 127 years ago. If EPRI, with a $300 million annual research budget, wanted an advanced grid architecture, don’t you think we would have had one by now?

I hope this is helpful, or at least thought provoking! Good luck with the panel, and stay in touch!

All the best,  -  Mark

Dear Tony,

Great to hear from you, and thanks for thinking of me in the context of the power-grid architecture discussion. As you know, it’s one of my favorite topics!

I think it might be a lot more interesting if, in addition to the technical discussion, you ask the panelists what they believe to be the drivers of technical innovation. For example, instead of just asking, “What does an advanced grid architecture look like?”, you might also ask, “How did we end up, after more than 100 years of development and billions of dollars of research, with an architecture that delivers just 30 percent of the energy in the fuel it consumes?”

I’m not suggesting by any means that panelists should be made to recount the sordid, criminal pasts of Samuel Insull and J.P. Morgan. What I’m saying is that it has not worked well up to this point to set technical goals and then hope that our social, economic, and environmental values will be upheld as a result. It makes much more sense to go about it the other way: set forth the values, establish rules to encourage and reward businesses for honoring them, and let innovation and entrepreneurism drive the technological direction that best advances the values. It’s an old-school conservative approach, true?

it’s beginning to happen, but it only works as well as the values we set forth, and we therefore have to be very specific about what we are trying to accomplish. If we decide we value having lots of distributed resources on the grid, we may end up with that, but it may or may not produce a desirable result.

Denmark has done a pretty good job advancing its values with its power grid. Ten years ago, the Danish government decided that the best way to foster entrepreneurism, innovation, and resource efficiency was to make the transmission system public and re-write it’s charter. The new charter gave every Danish citizen the right, upon connection to the power grid, to upload as well as download, and it required the highest possible end-to-end operating efficiency. They accelerated the process using feed-in tariffs, and the flood of interconnects necessitated development of the active architecture they use now.

If we learn from the Danish model and add to it the value of local self-reliance, it will probably lead to an architecture you described to me years ago:  a network of microgrids wherein each one can island itself whenever it’s beneficial to do so, or re-close with the larger system whenever that is more beneficial.

How do we get there? Again, one could better ask, “Why are we not there?” It’s because the power industry continues to insist that active participation of DR in grid support is dangerous to linemen, that high DG penetration leads to instability, and that plug-and-play interoperability isn’t viable because they need discretion over every interconnect. Those positions are less and less credible all the time. Remember when big tobacco used to claim that their research showed smoking wasn’t harmful, but when we finally took a look it turned out they had been lying for decades to protect their industry?

I’m quite sure you don’t want to stray into a racketeering discussion at an IEEE conference – I’m just showing the futility of waxing technological about an industry that is less efficient now than when it started 127 years ago. If EPRI, with a $300 million annual research budget, wanted an advanced grid architecture, don’t you think we could have had one by now?

I hope this is helpful, or at least thought provoking! Good luck with the panel, and stay in touch!

All the best,  -  Mark