Smart and agile power systems will let every home and business generate, store, and share electricity
By Jean Kumagai
Posted 28 May 2014 | 20:00 GMT
At first glance, downtown Fort Collins, Colorado, looks like a sweet anachronism. Beautifully preserved 19th-century buildings beckon from leafy streets. A restored trolley car ding-dings its way along Mountain Avenue. It’s safe and spotless, vibrant and unrushed.
And yet this quaint district is ground zero for one of the most ambitious energy agendas of any municipality in the United States. Fort Collins, population 150 000, is trying to do something that no other community of its size has ever done: transform its downtown into a net-zero-energy district, meaning it will consume no more energy in a given year than it generates. And the city as a whole is aiming to reduce its carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030, on the way to being carbon neutral by midcentury. To make all that happen, engineers there are preparing to aggressively deploy an array of advanced energy technologies, including combined-cycle gas turbines to replace aging coal-fired plants, as well as rooftop solar photovoltaics, community-supported solar gardens, wind turbines, thermal and electricity storage, microgrids, and energy-efficiency schemes.
The full article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/the-rise-of-the-personal-power-plant#WhatCouldGoWrong
The most important message may be in the sidebar: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
The Slow Death of the Grid
Too many off-grid personal power stations will undermine communal infrastructure
The price of photovoltaic cells continues to plummet while their efficiency continues to rise. Batteries and other energy-storage technologies are also getting better, prompting more people to unplug from the grid. If current trends continue, the result could be catastrophic, not just for the utilities but for anyone who wants access to affordable, stable electricity.
Here’s why. “When you have mass defection from the grid, that means many people are overinvesting in individual, unnetworked assets to meet their own peak energy demands,” says James Mandel, a manager at the Rocky Mountain Institute, in Boulder, Colo. “As a result, it leaves those least able to afford a personal power station—low-income customers, those who rent or have bad credit—to pick up the cost of the grid.” And those homeowners and businesses going it alone might find operating and maintaining their own “utility in a box” expensive and time-consuming, he adds. Needless to say, as their revenues erode, grid operators will hardly be viable. “That’s a future we’d rather not see,” Mandel says.
In some places, though, that future is already here. In Hawaii, where electricity rates are typically more than 40 cents a kilowatt-hour, having your own solar PV array with battery storage now makes economic sense for anyone who can afford it. In a recent report, The Economics of Grid Defection, the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted when that “grid parity” tipping point would occur in five U.S. regions. In Los Angeles and in New York’s Westchester County, for example, it could happen as early as 2020. Advances in other local generation options, such as combined heat and power systems that run off hydrogen fuel cells, could encourage even more people to leave the grid.
The report was intended as a wake-up call, Mandel says. “When grid defection becomes viable, it’s not a ‘could happen,’ it’s a ‘will happen.’ ” So six years or maybe a little longer, he says, “is how long we have to figure out a better model.”
The preferred future, according to the report’s authors and many other power experts, is a grid with even greater connectivity and smarts. The worst-case scenario, says Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, is that “the smart grid isn’t really smart. It’s dumb, and we don’t get the interconnectivity right.” In that bleak future, customers who once had access to relatively cheap and reliable service will face enormous price swings and frequent, chronic blackouts. And without a robust, sustainable grid, the other swell futures envisioned elsewhere in this issue—self-driving cars, household robots, thought-detecting wearable computers, and so on—won’t come to pass either.
“My preferred vision of the future isn’t at all inevitable,” Gellings admits. “That’s why I’m out there every day, traveling around the country, meeting with regulators and utilities, trying to get the message across.” —J.K.