A Smart Grid Prime

A Smart Grid Primer                           by Bob Bruggner

I’ve been struggling all week with my own understanding of what’s being referred to as smart grid technology: that is the modernization and updating of our system for distributing and delivering electricity to consumers throughout the country.  My apologies in advance but the best analogy I could come up with to help make sense of it all was the Interstate Highway System.  So now you know what you’re in for this week if you’re still brave enough to read this entire article. Smart grids, highway systems and for good measure, I’ll start (oh boy) with a little history lesson. 

In the summer of 1919, just months after the end of World War I, a truck convoy of 81 Army vehicles set out from Washington, D.C., on a trans-continental trip to San Francisco. The trip was a preparedness test of our country’s wartime readiness and assumed damage or destruction to railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, and highways. On the way west, the convoy experienced an endless series of mechanical difficulties, vehicles stuck in mud or sand, trucks and other equipment crashing through wooden bridges, slippery roads and harsh desert heat. Sixty-two days and 3,251 miles later, the convoy pulled into San Francisco where it members, including a young Army officer named Eisenhower, were greeted with medals, a parade, and a series of long-winded speeches. 

Nearly 40 years later, then President Dwight D. Eisenhower would successfully persuade Congress to enact the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 by citing his experiences during that 1919 convoy across America as well as the appreciation he had gained for the enhanced mobility of Allied troops using the German Autobahn system as they fought their way through Germany during World War II.  The Federal-Aid Highway Act was the beginning of a cooperative federal-state undertaking that we now know as 46,876 miles of Interstate Highway System. It’s hard to imagine what life in America today would be like without our Interstate System. Our national roads provide the backbone for the distribution of goods and services, travel to and from work, vacation and business travel and, well you name it.  Nearly one-third of all miles driven in the United States use the Interstate system.

Now let’s get connect to the Smart Grid.  Think of our nation’s current power grid system as a series of independent highways designed to move traffic around local neighborhoods. Made up of over 14,000 separate transmission substations, these power grids were designed in the 60s and 70s to simply receive power, usually from a single generating source, and redistribute that power back out, in one direction, to local customers. There is little doubt that the system has served us well but imagine trying to taking a cross county trip using these local electronic highways that frequently don’t connect to one another, have different speed limits and regulations governing their use, allow travel in one direction only, and have little flexibility in handling an ever increasing amount of traffic.   

Smart grids are being promoted as a means or tool to help connect all these local roads or transmission substations into one uniform network system, allowing for intelligent communication and efficient collaboration among all components of a national grid system.   The term “smart” is really just another way of saying digital. This transformation will occur primarily through the use of digital technology and communication software which will be designed to efficiently monitor and control the availability and routing of power on a national level.

So imagine a national power grid that could draw energy on demand from not only our existing oil, coal, and nuclear plants but also from an unlimited number of small, clean, renewable energy sources located throughout the country.  This energy could then quickly be routed to any location on the national power grid as needed. Power generated at night by wind farms in Montana could be routed to customers waking up on the East Coast while electricity generated by rooftop  solar collectors in Florida could be used to help Minnesotans stay warm during those long, cold winter months.   Sounds a bit futuristic but numerous public and private initiatives are already well underway.

The cost of implementing a national smart grid system will most assuredly be expensive.  But just as President Eisenhower’s investment in an Interstate Highway System helped fuel a post-war economic boom that we continue to benefit from today, Smart grid technology will serve as a fundamental building block to a post-oil, greener, and more efficient way of meeting our countries energy needs going forward.