1998

Smart Grid

Massoud Amin (b. 1961)

If you want to, you could engineer and operate your own power grid. Buy a gasoline generator and use it to provide energy for your home, and run a line to your neighbor’s house to provide her with power, too. If your generator is big enough, you could provide power to your whole neighborhood. But because of transmission distances, you might need to buy a transformer, convert the power from your generator to a higher voltage, run a single line to the next neighborhood, use another transformer there to step the voltage back down, and then run lines to the houses.

This is, in essence, how power grids got their start. But there is no data flowing in old-fashioned power grids. For 128 years grids were, for the most part, designed to move power only in one direction from large generators to customers. The “smart grid” is a term coined in 1998 by Massoud Amin who was working at the time for the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. Amin created and led a large research and development program, which funded 108 other professors and 240 researchers in 28 US universities along with 52 utilities, to promote research and development related to modernization and resilience of the grid. The smart grid’s objective is also to allow for many sources of power, variable sources of power, power storage, and a great deal of information flowing to help optimize power delivery.

For example, people put solar panels on their houses and sell the power back to the grid. Old-fashioned power grids were not engineered for this. A neighborhood with a lot of solar panels could produce more power than the neighborhood needs. Then a cloud can pass by and instantly cut solar output in half.

What if the power company would like to charge different prices based on load, in order to encourage people to use less power during peak loads? What if major appliances could turn themselves off during peak loads? What if part of the grid fails in a storm, and the grid would like to send a signal shutting off every non-essential appliance? All of these kinds of situations can be handled with a self-healing grid.

SEE ALSO Power Grid (1878), Light Water Reactor (1946), Itaipu Dam (1984).

Smart meters monitor energy quality and provide real-time energy consumption data in a smart grid.