The nice thing about a Smart Grid is that it would be more efficient and less wasteful of electricity and fuel. The bad thing about a Smart Grid is that for it to work correctly we all have to sell our souls to Big Brother…or at least the portion of our souls that want to use electricity, and by that of course I mean our bodies. For planned power usage to work in real life, like it can on paper, you have to have everyone agree on when they are going to use power, and more importantly you have to have everyone agree on when they aren’t going to use power. And by everyone, I mean everyone who uses electricity. So I mean everyone.
Smart Grid would regulate when people can and cannot use electricity. By people I mean individuals and businesses. The regulations would also regulate when electricity is produced. This would be in service of the “Only Baseload Plants” ideal. The ideal being that you have no peak power usage time period, so you have no need for Load Following plants, which almost have to be fossil fuel plants due to the quick response needs of load following, and hence are expensive. So individuals would be allowed to use X amount of power during Y timespan. Likewise Businesses would be allowed to use X amount of power during Y timespan. The ultimate result is a smaller peak power usage time and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more nightshift work. Since the vast majority of power usage occurs during the time span that transitions from business to home (People still working in the office and industry + people going home to turn on their air conditioning/heaters), more of the work using power will have to be done opposite to that time, like at 2 AM. Not necessarily a healthy thing for the working population (People are built to be awake during the day, and asleep at night). However, this isn’t the scariest thing about Smart Grid.
Another aspect of this is the enforcement aspect. These regulations wouldn’t be a touchy feely kind of thing. This would be a hardcore, “If you use electricity at the wrong time then we are going to rape you via fines and potentially send you to pound me in the ass prison.” This would be designed to keep people from breaking the new usage laws, and to force businesses to move their power usage to off times and individuals to reduce their power usage. This has the unfortunate effect of limiting those individuals and businesses which rely on their ability to use power when they need it, and not when they are told they need it. These kinds of people and businesses are usually referred to as emergency services or services necessary for emergent situations: Hospitals, Fire Departments, Police, Trains, Airports, Airlines, etc. Now you could make exceptions for these kinds of services, but ultimately every business that can, will then try and jump on that bandwagon. But even beyond that, there will be times when individuals and businesses will need to use electricity to survive, for some reason or another, but won’t be able to survive the fines that come with using the electricity. Ultimately it will limit your freedom, and the freedom of businesses. However, we are still not to the scariest part of this.
The scariest part of this is not the things that are related directly to Smart Grid, but comes from those things that will be invariably tacked onto any legislation that enforces Smart Grid. The really scary portion of that stuff will be how they will regulate how electricity must be produced. You see, any government regulation that goes down in this area, and trust me it will HAVE to be the government regulating this kind of thing, will also want to force the electric companies to “Go Green”. Here-in lies the real problem. The government will create an untenable situation, which is something it has done in almost any area it sticks it’s paws on. The Housing Market Bubble is the most recent one in my mind, but here is how the Go Green problems will happen.
1. The government requires Electricity Producers to Produce X amount of power during Y time periods.
2. The government requires Electricity Producers to Produce Z percentage of power with Green sources. Over time Z percentage will become larger and larger.
3. Due to the nature of solar, wind, and hydro power, Electricity Producer is unable to produce enough electricity to meet the government requirements. Blackouts and Brownouts occur. Government fines occur. Electricity Producers collapse/are bailed out/bought by the Federal Government.
4. The Government steps in with more regulation to “fix” the problem.
If you want a fuller story, and not just my ramblings here, check out the DOE publication: The Smart Grid: An Introduction. It’s 48 pages long, but colorful and well pictured, which probably means there is only about 15 pages of pure text. Reads decently as well.
Well your post seems to have gotten cut off.
I was hoping for a slightly less politically bent discussion of what Smart Grids do. This actually seems to be more a discussion of Planned Power Usage, which I actually haven’t heard being discussed as actual legislation but if such a thing as you describe were to come to pass, I agree it would limit our current capabilities. Its a political/social argument as to if that is limiting your “freedom”. Technically locking your door at night limits my freedom to walk into your house. Talking about limiting my freedom in this situation is a rhetoric argument.
Your blog, you’re rant, but next time you decide to post something like this, consider renaming the title to something more appropriate like ‘How a government could screw up Electricity’ rather than a title that leads people to believe this is how Smart Grids will work. I didn’t really like being led on until the fourth paragraph that this kind of stuff was mandatory in a smart grid. I was going to argue with you until I read the fourth paragraph.
Sorry. Smart Grid is a somewhat hot topic politically right now, and even the Wiki article about Smart Grid is in suspended animation due to the potential skewing and political rhetoric that are rampant in the topic. I explained what it is the best I could: An upgrade of the current transmission hardware + regulations to try and enforce a more baseline electrical load on the Grid. Not much of a post there, and not much about the implications on how it effects the users of the electricity on the grid and the producers, so I took it a bit further. To be fair, the first two parts were mostly just explanations of how the Grid works, and not as much politicalness.
I also disagree with the way you put the freedom argument as rhetorical. First, think about all the things you use electricity for, then think “The government is telling me that I can’t use all these things from 5 PM to 8 AM…basically not unless I’m at work, and when I’m at work all my creative energies are at work for the company, so I’m not allowed to use electronics when I’m creating things for me.” I agree, this wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t so massively dependent on computers, but we are. Hence limiting electrical usage limits freedom. Granted, we’d probably all move to battery powered stuff, but it’s a workaround at best.
However, that kind of regulation also limits freedom from another aspect that I haven’t explained yet, and that I will get into tomorrow.
If I’d been asked, I think I would have guessed that smart grids used current draw information to affect the routing and generation of electricity with the goal of increasing efficiency. If they do by definition entail regulations that attempt to flatten the usage over time graph, that’s pretty scary.