Over the past months Smart Meters and what I like to think of as the Semantic Smart Grid has been getting more and more press. A Twitter conversation this week has put me over the edge, it’s time to bring some thoughts together.

Electricity is, as most of us think of it, an abstraction. We’re thought to think of it as we would a flow of water. It’s got current, waves, flow, power. Really though, unless you’re unlucky enough to be electrocuted it’s pretty intangible.

The modern electricity grid is much like the contemporary newspaper industry. Fucked. It’s in big trouble unless it acts fast. It’s running on a century old business model of central manufacture of resource (electricity/news in power stations/newsrooms). It’s transmitting/broadcasting the product down one way pipes and crucially is neither listening to its consumers/audience nor is it aware of the conversation/usage its audience is engaged in.

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Interestingly it was not always so for Big Power. As Thomas Edison and the early electricity entrepreneurs electrified the big cities of East Coast USA there were power stations all over town. Maybe it’s time we looked again at this model, I’ve thought for some time that the best future use for the disused Battersea power station in London would be as a local, sustainable power station. But that’s a thought for another post.
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Smart Metering

Metering and visualization of energy consumption is vital.
We can’t manage change what we can’t measure. In this case what we want to change downwards is power consumption

Home energy visualization kits have been knocking around for the past few years and up until know have been largely the preserve of hackers . To introduce another analogy here let’s compare this activity to the use of Usenet in the early 90′s. Lots of smart people collaborating on important issues, but not getting widespread traction.

Balaji Natarajan on Earth2Tech conveniently continues the analogy in regard to management and communications tools for energy:

Simple HTML pages publicized the concept of the Internet to the common user back in the mid-1990s. A tool like this that offers a rich user experience can help in connecting the customer to the concept of the smart grid

Smart Meters will connect end-users to the Smart Grid in the way Mosaic and Netscape connected us to the internet. Again from Natarajan:

Extend the functionality of the smart grid into a variety of always-on lifestyle interfaces, including meters, panels, garages, vehicles, recharging stations and mobile devices. The Internet really took off within universities (and then everywhere else) because of the concept of the “browser.” From that point on, Internet access wasn’t tied to an IBM supercomputer or a Windows proprietary desktop. With that shift, the tantalizing possibilities of open access invited strong investment, and we continue to reap more benefits of such a model more than two decades later.

Bingo!

The Smart Grid

Which is one of the reasons these guys are jumping into the space

In their own words, Google’s launch partners

span the globe and are large and small utilities, rural and urban, privately held and municipally run and include one of the largest meter manufacturers. They all have one thing in common – a desire to serve their customers by providing access to detailed information that helps customers save energy and money.

The reality is that most global customers don’t have a lot of choice as to where they get their electricity, so the real benefactors here are the utility companies and of course Google, who just love collecting and organizing our data. And there are lots of reasons why Google would want this data.

Smart Grid + Demand Response

From WorldChanging.com:

Today our grids aren’t nimble enough to take advantage of renewables at large scale because of the intermittency problem, which requires huge amounts of electricity storage that is just not economically feasible today. Smart grids, however, help solve this problem in two ways.

First, by turning the grid into an internet, where it is read-write rather than a broadcast medium, we can take an excess of power being generated in one place (due to high winds or a sunny day) and route it a few hundred miles away where there’s more demand (due to night coming on, or cooler weather), then send power in the other direction an hour later when conditions have changed.

Secondly, as Amory Lovins has also mentioned, combining smart grids with large-scale adoption of electric vehicles would allow the EV’s [electric vehicles] to act as the massive storage capacity for the grid.

What a great idea. Using our cars as mobile batteries to help carry energy though the day. Then bring in Demand Response. From the same WorldChanging article:

[Tom Raftery] also mentioned demand response systems, which will be a huge new business market in the coming decades, with or without smart grids. Apparently the higher-resolution power meters these days are so good that you can tell the make and model of the appliances in a home just from their cyclic power signatures. You can even see when your fridge needs repair, by how it uses electricity differently. This raises privacy concerns, but also allows for intelligent upgrades of equipment for consumers. Connecting smart meters in your home (or factory or office) with smart grids, what if your power meter could poll all power generators to find out prices and carbon footprints for all generators online at the moment, and decide in real time what the cheapest and greenest power is to buy? (And remember that the greenest and cheapest will usually be the same.) Software-wise it’s not a hard problem; it’s like eBay with some scripting. But it requires a complete overhaul of the grid infrastructure to enable it. Raftery estimates that smart grids could save 2 gigatons of CO2 per year, so clearly this infrastructure is worth the investment.

Let’s go back to Google.

In theory, by connecting or even controlling the world’s smart grids Google could find itself in receipt of information on every. single. electrical. appliance. on . Earth. That’s some serious data. Will our fridges start displaying Google provided adwords for milk as our stocks run low? That would be some truly smart metering.

But right now, here’s an example of how we can bring all of this together.

Putting Smart Metering, Smart Grids and Demand Response all together you get something like this:
A trial in North Carolina integrating meters, smart grids and alternative energy sources.

The utility wants to use communication networks and software to power down certain energy-hogging actions during peak times (air conditioners) but at the same time keep customers happy and comfortable.

[The Trial] will include a utility-grade solar photovoltaic system attached to a substation, and a battery for energy storage (zinc bromide). The companies’ software will not only have to manage the energy data from the home devices but will examine how to use energy storage and solar to add more clean power but keep the grid load stable. While utilities and lawmakers are paying an increasing amount of attention to adding energy storage to the power grid as a way to address the variable availability of renewables (the sun shines and the wind blows only at certain times of the day), the Charlotte trial is groundbreaking in that it is examining how that can be managed alongside demand response.

Here’s an example of smart metering interfacing directly with appliances. See if you can spot the minor greenwash for GE. I mean, dude, you want to cut that electrics bill, get a smaller fridge.

We’re at an interesting juncture where I suspect many big utilities are waiting to see how Google’s initial work in this area progresses. We’re seeing increased consumer interest in opening up the electricity supply chain and as importantly wanting to supply energy, via small turbines and solar panels, back to the grid itself.

Whether consumers, Big Power, or the likes of Google or SAP fit neatly into roles (I’m thinking carrots, sticks and donkeys) remains to be seen. What is clear is that energy usage must come down and the proportion of renewables we use has to go up. Here’s the techonologies by which we can manage those transitions at a consumer and supplier level.

One area I haven’t had time to get into in detail here is the concept of a social semantic smart grid. Layering machine readable human information on top of the grid and using that to drive smart decisions. The grid as semantic web…