#North american electrical grid crack#

The main reason for peak-shifting is economic, Fox-Penner said: It reduces the utility's cost to provide power at high-demand times. The company expects to spend about $500 million in total on the program and projects that it will save BGE customers more than $2.6 billion. Last fall BGE received $200 million in stimulus funds from the Obama administration, part of $4.3 billion in national smart grid stimulus grants. 'That's the equivalent of a new nuclear power plant, at a fraction of the cost of building new generation,' said Mark Case, senior vice president for strategy and regulatory affairs for the utility, which is preparing to deploy two million smart meters and other energy management devices across its central Maryland territory over the next four years and initiate time-based pricing. expects to reduce peak demand by 2014 by about 1,500 megawatts, or more than 20 percent of total peak load. But all of these programs aim to shift consumption away from high-demand periods.īaltimore Gas and Electric Co. There are many ways to structure time-based pricing: some suppliers charge more for certain blocks of time when demand is typically high, like weekday afternoons, while others raise prices sharply on selected days when the grid is under heavy stress, as on the hottest days of summer. With regulators' approval, power companies can also use time-based pricing, charging customers based on the actual cost of power. Advanced metering lets utilities show customers how much electricity they use at different times of day and how much that power costs.

#North american electrical grid crack#

To crack this problem retail power suppliers are installing advanced metering systems (smart meters and wireless communications systems and databases to support them). Since users don't see how much power they are using or how much it costs in real time to generate it, they have little incentive to conserve energy or shift their use to off-peak hours.

What's more, power companies charge the same rate for every kilowatt-hour of electricity that's consumed, even though the cost of generating electricity can change dramatically during the day. Today the grid transmits information one way - from utility to customer - and most meters only show power usage for the current billing period. Suppliers such as utilities that deliver power directly to homes and businesses are focusing on a more visible element of the smart grid: meters. The smart grid will monitor everything at a very, very fine level of detail and reacts really fast, so operators will have time to fire up another plant if wind speed drops or a big cloud formation reduces solar output.' 'But if you have really up-to-date information on all the flows on your grid, you can tolerate a little more variability. 'The whole power system is engineered to balance demand and supply at every second, which means that control over generators is really important,' said energy consultant Peter Fox-Penner, a principal with The Brattle Group and author of Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities (Island Press, 2010). Better control will help utilities add more renewable power, a challenge now because wind and solar energy are intermittent sources, and grid operators can't always react quickly when their output fluctuates. Firms that operate long-distance transmission lines, such as the Independent System Operators that manage regional grids in New York, New England and the Midwest, are adding sensors, phasors, and other devices invisible to non-engineers, that give them much more precise control over the system. The transition is already under way, although it means different things for different companies. And it must be interactive so that customers can manage their electricity use. A 21st-century grid will also have to balance fluctuating power flows from wind and solar generation, small-scale distributed sources, and plug-in electric vehicles. To shrink the electricity sector's carbon footprint, experts say, the nation needs to build thousands of miles of new transmission lines over the next 20 years to connect more renewable resources to electricity demand centers. What it cannot do is support the massive shift to low-carbon power that scientists warn will be needed to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts. The National Academy of Engineering ranks it as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. electrical grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses.