Smart Grid is….an interesting idea. But it doesn’t involve storage of electricity, at least not the versions I’ve seen. But I’ll get into that after I explain how the Regular Grid works. And just so we aren’t starting off on the wrong foot, The Regular Grid is the thing we current use to get electricity from the power plant and into your house. If you read the last post, it’s all those cables, wires, and transformers between the generator and the wall plug.
Okay, so there are three things connected to The Grid: Generators – the things that make electricity, Loads – the things that use electricity (Like your air conditioning and your refrigerator), and The Ground – the ground. In a perfect world the amount of electricity being used by the Loads on the grids would exactly equal the amount of electricity being generated by the Generators. However, because this is not a perfect world, that is not the case. Most of the time slightly more electricity is being generated by the Generators than is being used by the Loads. That extra electricity goes to The Ground and is essentially wasted. Sometimes not enough electricity is being made by the Generators for the number of Loads on the Grid and some of the Loads lose power; this is what we commonly call a Brownout or Blackout. Now, in order to minimize wasted electricity, the electric company watches the Grid to see how much Load there is on the Grid at any one time. If they are producing too much power they call some of their power plants and say “Hey, produce less electricity please.”, and if they aren’t producing enough electricity then they call up some of their power plants and say “Hey, produce more electricity please.”. In that way they keep the Grid powered with enough electricity.
Some power plants are called Baseline Plants. These plants run all the time, non stop, as long as they can, and make up the baseline of the elecricity on the Grid. Typically these plants are Hydo-electric, Nuclear, and Coal, in that order because of the cost of producing power. Hydro costs almost nothing, Nuclear is the cheapest fueled electricity generator, and coal is the next cheapest. Other power plants are called Load Following Plants. These plants run dependent on the needs of the Grid. These are the plants that the electric company calls when it wants more or less power. They are usually Coal, Natural Gas, and Oil Fired plants, due to the expense of the fuel. The person, or people, who watch the Grid are called Dispatchers. Now the job of the Dispatcher is a lot more complicated than just watching the Grid and calling their power plants, and I’ll go into it in a later post.
The idea of a Smart Grid is to get rid of the Dispatcher, and replace them with a computer. It ties the Loads and the Generators together electronically so that only enough power is being made for the Loads on the grid. However, it gets a little more complicated, when you throw in the notion of Grid reform and planned power usage, which tends to be entailed in the whole Smart Grid idea. The scope of Smart gird is to upgrade the current cables and wires that make up the Grid to be more efficient, which would result in less wasted electricity during the transfer, to integrate communities and industry together to give the Grid a more baseline load structure, which would reduce the need for Load Following plants, and to use electronics to control both the use and the creation of electricity.
More to follow…
