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On Monday and Tuesday this week, I drove down to Massachusetts to my alma mater to give a talk to students in the computer department there. It’s about a 3.5 hour drive from Vermont, so I had plenty of time to listen to the radio on my way down and on my way back.
Generally I have to switch FM stations about 3 times on the trip, but the actual programming stays the same since one type of broadcast or channel is repeated on various sister transmitters. One topic that kept coming up on several talk shows that I listened to was renewable energy. There was one discussion in particular that I felt was really relevant, and that I hadn’t heard many people discussing.
They were talking about how ISO New England was predicting that over the next few decades, power demands would increase, but power generation requirements would actually decrease. As I talked about in a “**previous article**”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/kb1023/, it’s ISO New England’s responsibility to accurately predict power demands so that generation can meet that demand almost exactly every minute of every day. These people are absolute pros, so when they give this prediction about increased demand, but decreased generation requirements, we can trust them.
Ok, but how the heck is that possible? In the past, generation capacity was scaled to match peak demand. Peak demand is generally 50-100% greater than average demand, and it only lasts a few hours every day. In this system, what you end up with is generator plants that are excessively oversized compared to average demand. There are obviously some large inefficiencies in doing things this way. It would be like buying a tank for your commute because every now and then, you have to ford a river and shoot a projectile at some faraway target. You could get away with a much more efficient vehicle if you could just somehow avoid that extra stuff.
Managing the grid has changed a lot in recent years though. First, there are much larger mixes of intermittent renewables (solar and wind). Second, high speed communication and computers have enabled us to coordinate the grid far, far more effectively. These two factors mean that we can be more efficient about shifting power around where it’s needed, when it’s needed without necessarily having to increase the base generation capacity. Despite the intermittency, the greatly increased scale of renewables like solar and wind has enabled them to shoulder a sizable chunk of base load when they are operating. All of these factors combined are causing ISO New England to predict this decline in generation requirements.
However, they did also report a few alternate possibilities. Currently, electric cars make up a pretty small percentage of cars on the road–less than one percent in most areas. ISO New England noted that if in the next few decades, that percentage increases to even 5%, it would significantly affect their forecast. All those electric cars are going to have to get their power from somewhere, and 5% would represent a pretty big demand on existing generation capacity.
Another alternate possibility they reported was that in the future, it might be more common for people to be far more conscious of their electricity use. Right now, we flip a switch or turn on our blender and we probably don’t think anything about it. In the future, we might become a lot more in tune and aware of when the grid naturally has the most power available (say, on a sunny day when solar generation is maximized). They also said that electric grids might become smaller and more localized in the future which would help to facilitate this enhanced understanding of where the power is coming from.
I can definitely say from operating my own miniature solar power station for three years now that I’ve developed a totally different rhythm to my habits. It doesn’t even power that much in my house, but I try to rely on it as much as possible. My AppleTV runs off of it exclusively nearly 12 months a year, as does my lamp and iPhone and iPad charging needs. Recently I started using the solar power to run my sewing machine exclusively. What I’ve learned is that I automatically started to become much more aware of weather forecasts. If I can schedule my sewing while it’s bright and sunny, for example, I know I’ll be generating excess even with the machine running. If I know there are a few cloudy days in store, I might shut off the AppleTV and lamp a bit earlier at night.
Personally, I think we’re going to see a shift from all sides going into the future as electrical generation shifts, and our own habits are forced to shift. All in all though, it will mean that we’re more efficiently using power, which is never a bad thing from an engineering perspective.
