What Is A Smart Grid?

When you plug something into a wall socket, chances are you're connecting to a standard electrical grid. Like all grids, they are made up of power stations, a transmission network, and power distribution (i.e. sub-stations that actually supply your home and workplace).

Standard electric grids are overseen by control rooms where supervisors closely monitor the supply and demand sides, and attempt to match the two as closely as possible. They do this by running up or down, fast start, stand-by power sources like gas-fired power stations and hydro-electric. They might even shut down things like wind turbines if there's too much supply.

Standard electric grids depend on a great deal of manual intervention, backed up by a lot of mostly idle back-up power sources. Often these grids are pretty elderly, inefficient, and prone to local failures.

All this may have been manageable 20 or so years ago but things have become increasingly more complex. Back then a grid only had to cope with a relatively few sources of supply producing predictable amounts of energy. Now the grids have to handle far more sources, many of which may be highly variable (e.g. all those separate wind farms and solar arrays) and it's fast becoming unmanageable.

In short, standard grids are now considered inefficient, unreliable, too slow to respond to peaks and troughs in demand and supply, and expensive to run.

-ooOoo-

Source: http://horizonenergy.blogspot.co.uk/

In 2009, a United States Department of Energy study concluded that modernisation of US grids with smart grid capabilities would save 46 to 117 billion dollars over the next 20 years.

So what are smart grids? Well, the basic idea behind them is that they have real-time knowledge of everything that's relevant to them and act accordingly.

The goal is to have systems that know exactly how demand and every element of supply is changing as it happens and adjust both sides to smooth out those peaks and troughs.

If you manage that trick then you need fewer stand-by power stations, have no power outages, can handle more renewable energy, waste less energy, consumers have reduced energy bills, and carbon emissions are cut.

In short, smart grids improve efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability. It's good for the power companies, good for consumers, good for the economy, and good for the planet.

All this can be achieved with existing technology. For example:

• Smart meters in homes and businesses which let the system know about electric usage as it happens.
• Fault detection and self healing on all major elements of the system to avoid sudden loss of supply.
• Helping consumers cut their bills by showing them (via the smart meters) which appliances are the most power hungry.
• Reducing demand at peak times by automatically adjusting home appliances like air con, heating and fridges, with no adverse effects for the customer (via the smart meter, smart sockets, and smart appliances).
• Automated systems that juggle everything without the need for human intervention. 
• Once electric cars become more common-place, smart grids will even be able to store excess energy in their batteries, and draw on them when demand is higher.

This may all sound a bit futuristic but, in fact, smart grids are already rolling out across the world in the U.S., Italy, Canada, Germany, China, and the UK to name but a few.

Welcome to the future everyone.

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