Here’s a thought on the power of Google PowerMeter.
So far Google have partnered with eight utilities worldwide to provide end to end assistance in creating smart grids.
This gives Google an in to the electric grid and all appliances that sail on it.
Utilizing each appliance’s cyclic power signature Google can in theory tell who is using what appliance and in what state of repair each appliance is.
So imagine your toaster coil is wearing down. You don’t know it. Google does.
Google also knows your IP, your browsing habits, and when you’re likely to turn you laptop on for some smart grid research.
BAMMO!
Search Google for some smart grid action and there you have it, a brand new Kitchen Aid toasting device before you knew you even needed it.
Of course there are a whole slew of privacy issues here that Google aren’t silly enough to jump into, but you had better believe that PowerMeter doesn’t just mean Smart Grids, it means Sneaky, Nosey Grids too.
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.
***** 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.
*****
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 energyvisualization 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.
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
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.
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.
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…
Sorry I’m a day late with this Drudion, but I was in London yesterday at the G20 anti-Kapitalist protests that focused on the Bank of England. Unfortunately, I totally fucked up my plans through sheer yokel paranoia and came away empty handed. Intending to meet up with my dear friends, the writer Gyrus and U-Know editor Merrick, at Liverpool Street Station, at 10.30am, I left our W. Country home at 6am and was in central London just before nine. Nervous that there would be thousands of people milling about, I arrived on foot at Liverpool Street a full hour early, to be confronted by hundreds of police already in place. Of course, I was dressed extremely dodgily, with my hair up in a black wig and dressed in the kind of all-purpose rural chic that couldn’t have been further from my regular Rock God image (!). The police, however, were so fucking paranoid that they conducted a Stop & Search on me at the top of the escalators at 10.20; a full 40 minutes before the march had even started. Of course, I declined to give my name and address and, having no ID or cards on me, they detained me and wrote down a description. Unfortunately, when the main cop read on the report that I was wearing a stab vest, he came over personally and demanded to look at it. I just about managed to take the thing off without disturbing my wig, but the cop told me he believed the vest was part of a stolen consignment of police uniforms and gear, and that I’d taken off the labels to hide this fact. Kiddies, I’ve had this stab vest at least two years and wear it any time I’m in the city, but the cops just used this as an excuse to do a full body search and they soon confiscated my burka, a pair of women’s tights and all of my (expensive) police body armour. All of this occurred in full view of the general public and was clearly done just to make a show of me. When I still didn’t give my name, they sat me in a van to think about it for hours and the fucking protest went off with me detained. In the meantime, dammit, an exultant Merrick was texting me from Bishopsgate telling me the Climate Camp have taken over, while Gyrus had been penned in at the Bank of England. With hindsight, I’ll admit I looked extremely dodgy. But what got me most was how the police discovered all of my gear but still didn’t realize I was wearing a 99p black eBay wig! On the Stop & Search report I’m even described as having ‘Hair: black, short.’ I can’t show you my face on the self-portrait I took as I plan to use this disguise again in the future, but Holy McGrail referred to it as Scargill Chic and pointed out that there are clearly blonde tufts visible from underneath the rug. If McGrail could suss it from the crappy mobile phone photo (shown above), then so much for the West’s so-called War on Terror. What the fuck!
That one of England’s true rock (and I mean ‘rock’ in all senses of the word) heroes was detained at the Met’s pleasure for hours on end is galling enough but that he was recognized by none of his captors is truly an indictment on the state of policing in Britain today.
Long time readers will know I have a thing for Philly. So this makes so much sense.
One non-flippant note on this. I’ve heard two very serious people talk about land use in the last 30 hours. The first was James Lovelock at yesterday’s Nature debate. Lovelock made very clear his view that improving land use was the single biggest thing we could do right now to tackle climate change.
Nature magazine continued their Darwin season of talks in London tonight with a panel discussion entitled What Price Biodiverstity?.
The top caliber speakers were Professor James Lovelock, independent scientist, author of “Revenge of Gaia”. Michael Meacher, MP (Labour) & former Minister of State for the Environment and Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University. Not a joker amongst them. I’d also add the the quality of questioning from the floor was second to none, quite refreshing at these sorts of things where one can usually expect some variety of rogue element to attempt a hijacking of proceedings.
I only found out only this morning about the talk via @zzgavin on Twitter, and have time but for some brief notes here before getting on with the rest of my evening. The entire discussion took place in the context of one larger and one (debatable) less significant event. Climate change and the recession. But doesn’t (shouldn’t?) every conversation right now take place in that light.
So in no particular order:
Tiskell on the state of the biodiversity conversation:Talking about climate change is [relatively] easy, about biodiversity is much harder. We don’t even have the value system to measure it and the common man on the street simply can’t understand it. They won’t understand what we are losing until there is a cataclismic biodiversity event.
There was general agreement that the global conversation on protecting biodiversity was at least five years behind that of climate change. An example of this, in the UK we have the Stern Report on Climate Change and even a Climate Change Office. We have nothing similar to start combating the threat to biodiversity.
Meacher on our current value systems: These current systems have led to a belief that “only nature that can be made profitable should be preserved”. That’s the dangerous result of putting economic value on biodiversity
Lovelock on carbon trading schemes: Totally disastrous. As a result of carbon trading, less efficient coal stations in east Germany are producing MORE co2. These permits have been either given away of sold too cheap. Why didn’t we charge polluters, not give them credits. Carrots instead of sticks.
Tickell on industry: [they] wants to do the right thing and they will if they are given clear limits in which to operate in. Heads of industry aren’t oblivious, they know there are serious problems in the world but they want to know where they stand. [Political] leadership has to show the way here and TRUST that they can do it and we wasn’t this change.
Tickell on biodiversity in agriculture: Agriculture shouldn’t be a market activity. The market is set up to measure short term gain. It does that but does not record the long term damage industrial agriculture in particular does to land resource. Agreculture should be a community activity, enriching all around it.
Meacher on the subject of biodiversity value: even if we can come up with a bio-diversity index instead of GDP to give us a quantitive measurement of human activity, how do we make this measurement operative. How do we make companies change their business plans to fit this. How do we tie it into government budgets.
He mentioned in fact a sustainability index he had presided over in the Department of the Environment that never got anywhere because nobody had any . Meacher verged between accute peceimism and optimism at times, which struck me as sounding odd coming from a career politician. He was convincing when explaining his belief that we are now on the brink of a new world economic, environmental and cultural order.
Lovelock being the oldest and at times sounding the wisest got to round off the evening. He did so clearly, directly and without hesitation when asked if it were possible for a biodiverse Earth to survive.
Time, he said, is the biggest barrier to halting biodiversity decline and climate change. We are so far down the path that the goals of 2040 and 2050 that our institutions have set will be far too little too late.
Two related pieces in the Columbia Journalism Review over the past week on energy, climate change and the press’s role in covering the issue. And in my mind it is one issue, not two. This is a great example of what makes CJR such a great resource.
They have the ability to step back and look at the media landscape as it pertains many subjects in politics and finance asking the questions of journalists and bloggers that we don’t ask ourselves enough.
Curtis Brainard pulls apart pieces from the Pew Research Center, the NY Times, the LA Times and PBS. His thesis, that it may now makes sense for journalists to pull back from making planet saving proclamations in support of climate change action and instead frame the discourse around helping keep the pennies in the pocket of Joe the Plumber and other downstream media consumers.
Brainard pulls through some useful looking data from Revkin in the NY Times illustrating this. The fact of the matter is that people have bigger financial worries all of a sudden. In Brainard’s words:
A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center found that addressing the nation’s energy problems ranks sixth among a list of twenty voter concerns, with sixty percent of those polled agreeing that it should be a “top priority” for government. On the other hand, concern for protecting the environment and dealing with global warming has declined precipitously in the last few years, with those issues ranking seventeenth and dead last, respectively. The takeaway message for journalists is that those “stewardship” frames will not be sufficient in terms of galvanizing support for clean energy. In the pursuit of public engagement, the press would be better advised to link sustainability issues to economic growth and “green” jobs.
There’s plenty of other good shout-outs in the piece but here’s the real take-away:
The economics of sustainability is clearly a frame that is of particular interest to readers and audiences these days. Nova spends relatively little time discussing the impacts of global warming, which are presented only as contextual background. Though there remain many points of climate science that the media can and should explore, this seems a positive development because it implies that the press has accepted the basic threat of warming and is now prepared to address the cost and feasibility of various solutions
So far so good (perhaps). Brainard returns to a similar theme a few days later on CJR.org. Now here’s the really interesting part from my perspective.
One of the things that history will remember about the coverage of climate change is that, not unlike the Iraq War, the press itself became an important part of the story, largely due to faulty reporting at its outset….But, as CJR contributing editor Cristine Russell pointed out in a recent feature story, the fine points of science and technology must now be communicated to the political and business reporters who have been assigned to the coverage of climate solutions.
There’s no arguing that our business reporters need to know these points inside out. In fact, more importantly, the men and women inside the Treasury making the decisions these reporters report on need to know the facts. But all that doesn’t hide a big question that arises from the above thesis. Should be we be allowing the business pages abstract the world’s climate change problems into a more palatable, or certainly more applicable, problem for our media consumers. In other words should we concentrate on a set of self-centered reasons and try change human behaviour by appealing to people’s financial interests?
Many would argue that the end justifies the means, and in the case of climate change the situation is so dire and so urgent that we can dismiss only a very few options. But the media has a role to tell it like it is. To inform us that our actions and in action are having a direct and catastrophic impact on the world. If an Obama stimulus promotes green jobs and clean tech all the better, but let’s keep the climate change horse running in front of the economic cart.
Tom covers the big points on Greenmonk so I’m going to mention just one area that’s super-interesting for me. At 18 minutes Doug talks about leveraging social pressure, some would call would call it CO2-guilt, through social networks. It’s not a hugely original idea, but, in this case one we can pump an awful lot of creativity into. I’m not talking about the Dopplrs of the world, great though they in particular are. But rather burrowing into people’s social graphs on their already existing networks and laying the problem/solution right there right then.
What if your food was made by tiny little people with peasant hats and industrial aprons. Who were forced to work 18 hour days in horrible environments. Would your food be as tasty?
