Extreme storms such as Hurricane Sandy have pushed the U.S. electrical grid to its breaking point. The technology exists to keep the lights on—we just need to implement it.
Posted 01.28.2013 at 10:00 am
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Smarter Solar: Although most solar panels face south for maximum exposure, the Pecan Street smart-grid project found that west-facing panels- generate more power when demand is highest. Houses could be almost off-grid during peak hours. Courtesy Pecan Street Inc.
PLAN BETTER BACKUP
On the evening Hurricane Sandy struck, John Bradley was in his office on Broadway when the building suddenly lost power. Bradley is the associate vice president for sustainability, energy, and technical services at New York University, and he was on the phone with the local utility, Con Edison, at the time. “They were telling me they were systematically shutting down low-lying areas because they knew the storm surge and the full-moon high tide were going to hit around 9 p.m.,” he says.
It was 8:30. “I looked out my window, and all the lights were out,” Bradley recalls. “They said, ‘We’ve got some issues,’ and they got off the phone.” Nearly all of Lower Manhattan had lost power—except for much of the NYU campus.
In 2010, the university completed a project to replace its 1970s-era boilers with natural-gas-powered turbines, subterranean engines that generate 11 megawatts of electricity. Waste heat from the engines creates steam to produce an additional 2.4 megawatts and hot water, a process known as co-generation. Natural disasters were not at the top of the university’s list of concerns when the administration approved the project. “Number one was cost-effective production of electricity,” Bradley says. “Number two was reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.” (The system, which powers 22 buildings and heats 37, is saving the university millions of dollars each year; it’s also helped reduce the campus’s carbon footprint by 20 percent.)
New York University was an island of power in a darkened neighborhood.When Sandy knocked out that ConEdison substation, a third benefit of NYU’s self-sufficiency became clear. “My equipment sensed that loss of voltage, and the breakers opened up, isolating the NYU grid from the larger utility grid,” Bradley says. For the next week, NYU was an island of power in a darkened neighborhood. Staff set up power strips on long tables in the library and unlocked outdoor outlets for anyone to use. “You saw people from the community plugging in their laptops, iPads, and phones all over campus,” Bradley says.
Natural-gas systems also kept much of the Princeton University campus and a sprawling Bronx apartment complex known as Co-op City up and running. Critical services such as hospitals, hotels, and fire stations should all have self-sufficient power generation, says Kelly. And relying on natural gas makes sense, he says, because it already flows through underground pipelines. Diesel must be trucked in to keep generators online and, during storms like Sandy, such fuel can be scarce.
Buildings can also rely on renewable-energy systems during a blackout. Solar panels on the Midtown Community School in Bayonne, New Jersey, helped power it as an evacuation center during Hurricane Sandy. But if such systems can’t automatically disconnect from the grid, utilities require them to shut down. Workers attempting to repair lines could be killed by electricity flowing back into the grid. “It’s like they’ve been on one-way streets all their life, and now all of a sudden there’s a car headed toward them,” Mantooth says.
A special inverter connected to a battery can enable buildings to island, or isolate themselves from the grid, as they continue to produce and store power. But existing technology is cost-prohibitive for homeowners. Mantooth’s lab is developing an affordable alternative: a microwave-size “green power node” that could be mounted on a garage wall. He hopes to find a manufacturer who could sell it at home stores for about $500.
INVEST IN EFFICIENCY
The more power coursing through an aging infrastructure, the more vulnerable the grid will be to disruption—even without a natural disaster. Over the last three decades, U.S. household electricity usage tripled, from 30.3 million BTU per home in 1980 to 89.6 million BTU in 2009. Transformers, meanwhile, are now more than 40 years old on average, and 70 percent of transmission lines are at least 25 years old. To be resilient, the grid-—and those who rely on it—must also be more efficient.
Many utilities have already begun to replace one ubiquitous and outmoded device: the electricity meter, generally a spinning dial mounted near a thorn bush at the back of the house and read, in person, once a month. About 40 million U.S. homes now have smart meters, devices that digitally monitor and communicate home power use as often as several times an hour. The information allows utilities to track and bill more precisely—and recognize power outages instantly.
In Austin, Texas, volunteers in a smart-grid project are testing tools that will help the grid work more like the Internet, with two-way energy and information flow. So far, engineers have equipped 480 houses with advanced energy-monitoring systems. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin analyze the data with supercomputers. “We carry out the nation’s deepest-ever research on how people use electricity and natural gas on literally a second-to-second basis,” says Brewster McCracken, president of Pecan Street, the consortium that runs the project.
Companies such as Intel, Best Buy, and LG have also partnered with Pecan Street to test and develop products in a real-world setting. For example, Sony has installed a home energy -management system that measures the power consumption of various appliances from a single outlet and can be managed through a television set-top box. Homeowners can use the real-time data to minimize their load on the grid, shifting such activities as electric-vehicle charging to periods of surplus power.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 devoted $16 billion to installing new transmission lines and implementing smart-grid projects such as Pecan Street. It’s a modest start. Truly modernizing the U.S. grid will require an investment of $673 billion, according to a recent study by the American Society of Civil Engineers. In the meantime, the costs of inaction continue to add up: Hurricane Sandy caused $69.7 billion worth of damage to New York and New Jersey. Just weeks after the storm, Governor Andrew Cuomo requested federal funding to help New York install the technology for a smarter grid. “It will be a significant investment,” New York State Smart Grid Consortium’s Manning says. “But Sandy has rewritten the opportunity to make the case.”
Kalee Thompson is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. She plans to add solar panels to her home after she can island it. This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Popular Science.
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While Europe is building a massive Supergrid (much of it with DC lines) for it`s solar, wind and bio energy transports. And while Europe and China keep expanding high speed rail to more cities the US is only lowering investments in roads, energy, rails etc. As the US corps of engineers explains US infrastructure is already greatly underfunded and much of it outdated and in deteriorating state).
Just wait till the budget limit day is reached and real big cuts will start to be made on infrastructure (and much more). Democrats and Republicans will not give each other an inch to decent compromise. It`s like 5 year old's are now running a nation.
The city lost power, because via water breakers tripped. The breakers tripped for good reasons.
If you trip breakers prior to making the situation safe from water, you have a lot of electrified fried circuits and people, so adding power from another source is not helpful, until the initial problem is dealt with and considered safe for electrical power.
For hospitals, fire houses, police stations or other agencies deemed essential, I put emergency power generators on the roof of buildings with the means to run power on its own circuit.
Of course, true electrical engineers might find problems with my solutions and have better solutions of their own.
Your Grid problem in the US is political. This is the sort of massive infrastructure work that can only be done by government but you all seem convinced that would be a 'socialist / communist / muslim' plot! You are your own worst enemy!
^
Yup, pretty much. Blame the greedy politicians for not getting anything done. I suppose we could go ahead and also blame the citizens for voting them into office. I hope the world is prepared for when a huge solar flare event comes like the one back in 1859. If an event like that one happened today there would be a lot of damage. Many things can be done to prevent damage, but like I said it's all politics, and money too.
Keep in mind that by combining the communication fiber optic builds required for smart grid systems, with the needs of a fiber to the block system such as overlay's Google Kansas city and Chelsea NYC, the cost sharing would make the two dirt cheap. Problem is it would put Big Telecom out of business and they own pretty well all politicians at all levels.
In the ideal US grid all fossil fuel and wind/solar facilities would be replaced with 2500 nuke plants one to every 100K population. Plants would supply offpeak synfuel, desalination, EV charging, and hot water/ice making HVAC systems. By replacing expensive, deadly and sickening, destructive fossil fuels plant the rate of return on the investment to the nation as a whole in a kind of a FDR New Deal would pay back at 40% per annum.
With these smaller grids the loss of transmission lines would be far less critical and whats left would be easy and cheap to engineer.
Unfortunately same problem as with the smart grid. It would put Big Oil/Coal out of business and they own pretty well all politicians and media at all levels.
"A tree blown down, wires ravaged by wind, a flooded power facility—each event had rippled out to affect homes far from the point of failure."
Just cut damn trees 15 feets on each side of each power line.
It was Nikola Tesla who made the grid of today, not Thomas Edison. You would think a science mag like this would get big things like this right!
gotta stop thinking whole cities out of the blocks. start small, then progress. you tube search ore5ssg
It was David Manning - executive director of the Smart Grid Consortium -- who doesn't know his electrical basics. But, PopSci should have caught it.
Not that either Tesla or Edison deeloped the grid. Tesla's AC and transformer technology did enable the grid that we have today.
Side note to the Euros -- there are high voltage DC lines in the US, they've been in place for years.
But to the point of the article. A lot of the NYC problems with Sandy were related to the physical location of certain elements. I think that even PopSci mentioned the need for a 'tougher' grid in some areas. Tougher being one that's more resistant to weather related issues.
As for the smart switches, I'm sure that they're great. I suspect that the reason that the utilities are fighting them is because of cost. The 'loop back ' would seem to mean an additional supply lines for each switch location -- how else are they going to get the power. It can probably be done by just adding a 'bypass' line between each switch (cutting out the impacted area),but it will call for more big beefy supply lines-- which will also have to be maintained. Nothing is free.
I'm somewhat surprised that demand is rising. Our local utility reports that energy saving efforts have been so effective that demand is falling. Maybe we don't have enough hybrid cars.
As touched on by Cookiees453 ,the worst possible thing that could happen to any grid,smart or otherwise,would be another 1859 style Carrington Event,which would not only be very expensive,it could also result in millions of deaths,and make the U.S. a third world power overnight: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/a-perfect-storm-of-planetary-proportions
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@ford2go. Having some dc lines has zero in common with building a full supergrid with massive large scale next gen AC and DC lines and substations like Europe is doing. As this article explains it would take some 700 billion to upgrade the US grid but the only investment done is 16 billion. Buying a single car wheel is not the same as buying and driving a full car. Not even close.
As an addition to mathew's comment: Edison fought tooth and nail against alternating current. Edison was not a scientist or an engineer, he was a tinkerer. He and Henry Ford got along very well because of that. Ford even work in one of Edison's "labs" before he started building cars. Edison was also a showman, and a callous one at that:
www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/dayintech_0104