As a home owner, I am (I think) rather a typical consumer of electricity.
By no means am I an industry analyst or what’s called a consumer advocate. By profession, I'm a conference program director / speaker recruiter / event organizer, and in the course of beginning work with a new client, the world of “Smart Grid” was thrust upon me.
I had to Google a-plenty to prepare for my interview with that new client...
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It wasn’t JUST that I had no idea what in tarnation “smart grid” was .. I wasn’t even acquainted with the concept of the ELECTRIC grid.
[And this despite having lived as an adult New Yorker through the August 14, 2003 blackout. I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I tend to simply zone out unfamiliar concepts that don’t immediately interest me or concern me, so the only words I absorbed from those news reports were “power outage.” Terms like “ISO,” “transmission grid,” and “28,700 MW of load” just caused me to turn to Channel Numb.]
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No doubt my affinity for comic books and vintage movies had much to do with this, but upon hearing “Smart Grid” my imagination immediately conjured up a super-colossal mesh structure with Frankensteinian sparks snapping across it, securely stationed somewhere like Nebraska.
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A friend of ours – a college professor, and a more conscientious home owner you could not find – was fully familiar with the electric grid concept when I asked him, but not Smart Grid. Other friends I grilled – intelligent, savvy, modern home owners all – had never heard of Smart Grid.
So I started researching .. and found that for the residential electricity consumer, there’s not much yet written about Smart Grid IN ENGLISH, not in vendor-techno-babble.
And I thought, well, maybe others might benefit from the research I’m doing to get myself up to speed .. so I decided to share it here on my website, and via Twitter - @whatISsmartgrid
As I understand it, here’s the situation in as small a nutshell as I can squeeze it:
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First: of course there’s not a single mondo physical “grid” per se. The “electric grid” is more a figure of speech, much like saying “television NETWORK” to describe how TV content is distributed, and “World Wide WEB” to describe how computer pages of text and images are linked.
The “electric grid” refers to our national electrical delivery system. Also called the U.S. Power Grid, the power distribution grid, the energy grid, etc.
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Very, very simply put: the electric grid is a giant, complex network of people and machinery working around the clock to produce and deliver electricity from power plants to millions of homes and offices across the nation.
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The problem: this electric grid is OLD.
If Thomas Edison were alive today, he’d be quite familiar with our electrical infrastructure - not much has changed in a century.
Google's Eric Schmidt noted: “This grid that we depend on is CREAKING.”
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Yabbut - how is all of this significant to the residential consumer?
That will be the next installment in this learning odyssey.
Meanwhile, many thanks to these excellent sources:
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ABOUT THIS CONSUMER:
Peggy Kilburn grew up in a much-beloved 1918 house in the Northeast, where “air conditioning” meant “open windows” and “air filter” meant “window screens.”
She and her husband and 4 very furry cats are now cozily ensconced in central North Carolina - in an all-electric house with a heat pump / heating system that required total replacement last December. When their monthly electric bill skyrocketed from a previously preposterous $350 to an utterly unconscionable $700+ ... she fueled her outrage into a keen interest in ENERGY EFFICIENCY.
Her personal energy-efficiency quest pointed her to a similar scenario on a much grander scale: our country's rather dire need for something called a SMART GRID. So - from the perspective of an average homeowner – she’s sharing her findings with fellow residential energy consumers.
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