Girding Up For the Power Grid (Long Article)

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Girding Up For the Power Grid

By Steve Silberman 2:00 a.m. June 14, 2001 PDT

When Times Square flickered out below him, the pilot feared he was witnessing a terrorist attack. Beneath the suddenly dark canyons of Manhattan, subway trains lurched to a stop, stranding hundreds of thousands of rush-hour commuters. To a satellite in orbit, it must have looked like a major constellation was being snuffed out.

First Toronto went black, then Rochester, Boston, and finally New York City. In just 13 minutes, one of the crowning achievements of industrial engineering - the computer-controlled power grid of the 80,000-square-mile Canada-United States Eastern Interconnection area - was toast.

For the first time in decades, night held dominion over the cities of the Northeast, which were now without traffic signals, television, airport landing lights, elevators, and refrigeration.

You might say that the cascading blackout of November 9, 1965 - eventually traced to a single overloaded relay in Ontario - was the dawn of the networked era. The moment the lights went out, 30 million people woke up to the fact that the apparently seamless scrim of modern life is stretched over an intricate and vulnerable technological infrastructure that transcends national borders.

Now, 36 years later, in the halls of the Electric Power Research Institute, they've been calling the energy debacle in California the perfect storm. Founded during the national period of soul-searching that followed the failure of the grid in 1965, EPRI believes we still have not fully heard the message of that massive blackout. The underlying lesson of the current crisis, researchers at the institute believe, is that we need smarter methods of electricity generation, transmission, and delivery - not just more power. "This isn't about stringing more wires, or rallying around to make today's technology work better," says EPRI's president, Kurt Yeager. "That's trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

The utilities' own privately funded think tank, and the sole independent research organization employed by more than 1,000 power companies, EPRI was the first industrywide R&D consortium in America. It's still one of the largest in the world, representing utilities in 40 countries. EPRI's constituency - ranging from old-guard, investor-owned monoliths like Consolidated Edison of New York to upstarts like Mirant and Dynegy - generates 90 percent of the electricity used in the United States.

The Bush-Cheney administration's declarations about beefing up our energy networks with 21st-century technology rang familiar at EPRI, because the institute has been laying the scientific groundwork for this technology for decades. Though EPRI's oldest members stand to gain from an energy policy that favors traditional means of boosting supply (such as building more fossil-fuel plants, extracting more oil, and reviving the domestic nuclear power industry), the institute's spokespeople share the conviction held by many researchers in our national energy laboratories that the administration's emphasis on supply-side solutions could be disastrous, if the budgets and legislation that follow undercut the search for alternative means of producing, distributing, and using energy.

National debate over the merits of such short-term nostrums as drilling in national wilderness areas, EPRI believes, is a distraction from what's really at stake: our ability to implement a practical blueprint for a radically new conception of the energy grid.

In recent years, a series of technological breakthroughs - and, more important, a critical mass of scientific ideas - has begun to coalesce around a new model for an energy system that would better serve the needs of the near future, while enabling power producers as well as consumers to lessen their impact on the environment in the long term. Both privately and publicly, many at the institute express concern that the policy thrust of the current administration will lock out the most promising set of innovations to emerge in the energy community since the creation of the existing grid in the first half of the 20th century. The end result, they fear, may be to freeze us into high-emissions power pathways for decades to come.

"We've seen the words that they're getting the message," Kurt Yeager says. "Now let's hear the music." In fact, at the budgetary level, the administration has been singing a much different tune - systematically slashing the programs that produced the technological developments they're now touting to sell their policy.

"The current regime in Washington believes that the tree-huggers can go be virtuous and make sacrifices while real men go out and build more pipelines," EPRI spokesperson Brent Barker observes. "They think new technology appears by magic. The problem is that the existing technology puts us on a collision course with the environment. Their strategy is to keep us on that course."

Like the infrastructure itself, the failure of support for long-range R&D transcends national borders. Ironically, as the global economy becomes increasingly dependent on the digital networks made possible by electricity, public funding worldwide for tapping new, cleaner power sources and evolving our infrastructure is tanking. The US spent one-third less on energy R&D in 1995 than it did in 1985. Germany, Italy, and the UK spent two-thirds less. Venture capital and private investment in energy research almost never address systemwide issues. The grid itself is falling through the cracks.

The smarter energy network of the future, EPRI believes, will incorporate a diversified pool of resources located closer to the consumer, pumping out low- or zero-emissions power in backyards, driveways, downscaled local power stations, and even in automobiles, while giving electricity users the option to become energy vendors. The front end of this new system will be managed by third-party "virtual utilities," which will bundle electricity, gas, Internet access, broadband entertainment, and other customized energy services. (This vision is reminiscent of Edison's original ambition for the industry, which was not to sell lightbulbs, but to create a network of technologies and services that provided illumination.)

Now, the digital networks will be called upon to remake the grid in their own image. By embedding sensors, solid-state controllers, and intelligent agents throughout this new supply chain, the meter and the monthly bill will be swapped out for something more robust, adaptive, interconnected, and alive: a humming, real-time, interactive energy marketplace.

EPRI's bland headquarters, just up the road from Xerox PARC in the heart of Silicon Valley, looks like an unlikely place to invent the future of energy. With 750 employees at work in a cluster of office-park bunkers, there are no fuel cell-powered cars undergoing testing in the parking lot, no photovoltaic arrays or wind turbines spinning on the roof. The site serves purely as a command center for nuts-and-bolts science that happens elsewhere.

This dislocation is intentional. EPRI's founding director, Chauncey Starr, who is now 89, was shrewd enough to know that the utilities - then still secure in their monopoly markets - wouldn't be patient enough to give Starr half a decade to build the equivalent of a Bell Labs for energy research. The new operation would have to run lean. His strategy for extracting the maximum value from limited resources was a sensible one. Instead of stealing talent from the utilities' own R&D shops, and sinking billions into new infrastructure, the institute would assemble small, agile, task-oriented teams from the best and brightest in academic, corporate, and government research, outsourcing the lab work to existing facilities. When a project was completed, the findings would be disseminated to the institute's membership, and the team dissolved.

Power Grid

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 14, 2001


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