Yesterday we posted about the Physics Today article covering the current status of hydrogen fuel technology. The same issue of Physics Today has another article of interest to worldchangers, this one covering the history and potential evolution of the electrical power grid. While it focuses on the grid in the United States, most of the observations are applicable across the developed world, and give some hints for leapfrogging directions.
The North American power grid is truly an astounding feat of engineering, but it has seen better days. Investment in infrastructure upgrades and repair in the 1990s was as low a percentage of industry revenues as it was in the days of the Great Depression and World War II. The system was built to handle the kinds of varying analog loads typical of the 1950s and 1960s; the need for constant clean power characterizing digital technology is more taxing to the system than many of us are aware. Policies to introduce greater market competition, open access to providers, and even environmental regulations have added uncertainty and stress to the creaking infrastructure. The 2002 blackout in the northeast, while a sign that the emergency systems operated properly (if they hadn't, the blackout would have been far larger and much longer-lasting), was also a harbinger of failures to come.
But there are solutions at hand, and some are ideas we've talked about here on WorldChanging. They include:
The article suggests a number of other solutions, as well.
Adding distributed energy and "energy portals" (a term which smacks of late 90s dot-com jargon to me) has the potential to make the electricity network run in a way approximating the Internet, with a greater diversity of both providers and consumers -- and, when you add home generation via solar, wind, fuel cells or plug-in hybrids -- nodes which do both. Following this line of thought, an Internet tool which could lead to a provocative future for the power grid is BitTorrent: a Free/Open Source system of distributed file sharing, where a downloader doesn't get the entire file from any one source, but from all BitTorrent users with the file currently online. Moreover, once the downloader starts to receive the file, s/he becomes an upload source as well. I can imagine a system where instead of sharing files, a Free/Open Source Power network of homes share electricity, both "uploading" and "downloading" as needed, using the BitTorrent model.
There are undoubtedly many problems with this idea, but at it's an intriguing possibility.
