Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid. A whopping 40 percent of all the energy used in the US—be it oil, gas, wind, or solar—is converted into electrons that travel over these wires. Any attempt at energy reform must begin here.

But this keystone of our 21st-century economy has yet to advance much beyond its 19th-century roots. Considering how wasteful, unresponsive, and just plain dumb the grid is, it isn't surprising that outages—which have been increasing steadily over the past quarter century—cost us $150 billion a year. The real shock is that the damn thing works at all.

Now consider what we will ask the grid to handle in the near future: Demand for electricity is expected to increase by as much as 40 percent in the next two decades—more than twice the population growth rate. To meet that need, we will have to generate an additional 214 gigawatts, a feat that would require the construction of more than 357 large coal plants. We also want to plug in dozens, if not hundreds, of gigawatts of wind and solar power harvested from the most remote corners of the country. And we will want to recharge millions of electric vehicles every night, without fail.

That is why we must fix the grid—reinvent it to be reliable, efficient, responsive, and smart. Washington is already on the case: President Obama has called a new energy agenda "absolutely critical to our economic future," and his stimulus package directs more than $40 billion toward that goal—the largest single infusion of government capital to the energy sector in US history, more than half of which will go to grid-related projects. In the short term, this bonanza aims simply to create jobs. But in the long term, it lays the groundwork for the grid of the future. (About $400 million will go to fund ARPA-E, a sort of Darpa for energy research.) And this is just the beginning: Congress is considering additional legislation in the hope of remaking our energy infrastructure.

Private enterprise is on board as well. Just take...

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-04/gp_intro

There are some extremely good links at the original article. And the article itself is outstanding, IMO.

Here is one sample:
$400 Million For Off the Wall Energy Ideas

Two years ago, the U.S. Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, known as ARPA-E, at the Department of Energy, to inspire risky energy and climate related research. Till now, however, the concept hasn't gotten a dime in federal money and the Bush Administration didn't even set up an office for it.

ARPA-E's future suddenly looks a lot brighter with lawmakers agreeing on a $400 million budget for it as part of the stimulus package. The agency now also has support at the highest levels of the new Administration: The guy who invented the concept as a member of the Gathering Storm panel at the National Academies is Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. His new deputy, Sue Tierney, sat on the board of an organization that lobbied to help make ARPA-E happen. Lawmakers hope ARPA-E will be what one staffer calls a "lean and mean" research arm of the often stodgy DOE. Description of the agency as envisioned by lawmakers follows.

From the House Science Committee's description of...

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/02/400-million-for.html

The "seven ways" (linked from the left hand side of the main page)
are short but informative items - thanks for posting this!
:thumbsup: