I started hearing about the "smart grid" and was confused as to why it was supposedly needed.
I must admit that I had no idea that you guys don't know when my power goes off. But actually I find that hard to believe. Surely you must see something; a drop in load, voltage levels increase? Even I can see lower gas flows and higher outlet pressures, even though I may not know what every customer is using, I will have realtime pressure, temperature and flows at gas sources and at the high demand clients. If its true you're operating blind, I can see where a smart grid offers advantages to the grid operators to get hold of some information from critical points in the system, but is it really true you must have access to my home distribution panel?
I suppose every bit counts and raising my thermostat by 1 degree x 1E6 users might enable a peak generator to be switched off, but I have some suspicion that there is more to this than 1 degree. Who knows, it might save me a doller or two, as long as they turn the thermostat on the airconditioner up one degree and the heater down one... and they don't return it to position too early. However I still have some difficulty believing its not the fox guarding the chicken house, or worse, more like the 3 piggies and the wolf... "Come out, come out, or I'll blow your house down!" kinda' thing. I think a "smart-enough" grid can be implementing critical grid point monitoring alone and there isn't really any need at all to monitor my personal energy usage.
An article about smart grid installation in Italy said that 30 million new meters would generate 500 million in revenue, apparently revenue somehow unbilled now, so it was a great incentive. That's 16 Euros/meter and I was billed 75 euros for mine, that's 2.25 billion. Out of 2.75 billion I guess they probably made 1.5 billion on it. So, isn't this just a clever way to get the customer to pay for the network SCADA upgrade by installing things that can be directly billed to the end user and make a few billion in the process, rather than put a few monitors at critical points?
Isn't the personal energy usage manager just a clever add-on to get an excuse to put in a meter that knows when I'm using electricity in my hydroponic basement garden, or can determine if I or the neighbors are bypassing a meter and stealing electricity outright?
It seems if it were really as hot a topic as they say, there would be some chatter about implementing it in this forum already too. So, why so quiet about the smart grid? What's the engineering viewpoint on the smart grid? Most of the things they say are advantages for me can be done with a $10 timer on my hot water heater.
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"The problem isn't finding the solution, its trying to get to the real question." BigInch
I must admit that I had no idea that you guys don't know when my power goes off. But actually I find that hard to believe. Surely you must see something; a drop in load, voltage levels increase? Even I can see lower gas flows and higher outlet pressures, even though I may not know what every customer is using, I will have realtime pressure, temperature and flows at gas sources and at the high demand clients. If its true you're operating blind, I can see where a smart grid offers advantages to the grid operators to get hold of some information from critical points in the system, but is it really true you must have access to my home distribution panel?
I suppose every bit counts and raising my thermostat by 1 degree x 1E6 users might enable a peak generator to be switched off, but I have some suspicion that there is more to this than 1 degree. Who knows, it might save me a doller or two, as long as they turn the thermostat on the airconditioner up one degree and the heater down one... and they don't return it to position too early. However I still have some difficulty believing its not the fox guarding the chicken house, or worse, more like the 3 piggies and the wolf... "Come out, come out, or I'll blow your house down!" kinda' thing. I think a "smart-enough" grid can be implementing critical grid point monitoring alone and there isn't really any need at all to monitor my personal energy usage.
An article about smart grid installation in Italy said that 30 million new meters would generate 500 million in revenue, apparently revenue somehow unbilled now, so it was a great incentive. That's 16 Euros/meter and I was billed 75 euros for mine, that's 2.25 billion. Out of 2.75 billion I guess they probably made 1.5 billion on it. So, isn't this just a clever way to get the customer to pay for the network SCADA upgrade by installing things that can be directly billed to the end user and make a few billion in the process, rather than put a few monitors at critical points?
Isn't the personal energy usage manager just a clever add-on to get an excuse to put in a meter that knows when I'm using electricity in my hydroponic basement garden, or can determine if I or the neighbors are bypassing a meter and stealing electricity outright?
It seems if it were really as hot a topic as they say, there would be some chatter about implementing it in this forum already too. So, why so quiet about the smart grid? What's the engineering viewpoint on the smart grid? Most of the things they say are advantages for me can be done with a $10 timer on my hot water heater.
**********************
"The problem isn't finding the solution, its trying to get to the real question." BigInch
