Current reading: Smart Power, by Peter Fox-Penner.
Here's a random fact I did not know: power demand and power generation in a power system have to be kept in balance. There has to be as much power going in as there is coming out - neither more nor less. That makes sense. What I didn't realize (though it's logical when you think about it) is that this is actually achieved by turning off and on power plants. During slack demand, there are power plants that are shut off or idling. When peak demand hits, these plants get turned on. The plants that run all the time are the ones that are most efficient; the plants that get turned on to meet peak demand are the less efficient, often older plants which cost more money to run. This is the physical reason behind variable power pricing: peak power is not simply subject to higher demand, it's more expensive to produce.
Other potential ways of balancing include consumption management through tactics like demand response pricing, energy storage within the system, and distributed generation - all of which are components of the so-called "smart grid", and all of which we haven't historically had the tools to do effectively.
We read an interesting case in Administrative Law that was about a giant mechanical battery: Pump large amounts of water into a big tank at the top of a mountain during periods of low demand (increasing consumption), and then run it back into a lake or river through a hydroelectric generator at periods of peak demand. The net effect is to move generation power from low demand periods to high demand periods with some (substantial) loss of energy along the way.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've read about something similar. Basically, the problem right now isn't that there's NO way to store energy (there are also big batteries out there) but rather that right now, storage is very low efficiency, losing a percentage of what you want to store in it. Thus efficiency gains from using storage are canceled out by efficiency losses inherent to the storage.
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