With all the talk about modern smart grids and the call for increased transmission to deliver new renewable energy to consumers, eager to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, little attention is given to how antiquated and inefficient long distance transmission is. A March 2009, National Geographic article, citing the Energy Information Administration* points out, “…for every kilowatt-hour used, 2.2 are “lost” as that energy is generated and sent over transmission lines.”
Hardly a sustainable business model, centralized power production only works for the monopolized utilities because the ratepayer is compelled to pay for their inefficiency by the PUC. The centralized grid delivery system is like taking the mountain to Mohammad except as energy demands increase the mountain keeps getting bigger and further and further away.
As promising as smart grid technology seems the primary goal is better load matching and therefore fewer wide scale blackouts, not efficiency. Smart grids will be effective for managing over spinning events that have wind farms producing excess power and redirecting it elsewhere but it does nothing to reduce wheeling or thermal losses.
Today’s central grid is based on Edison’s 1882 Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, serving less than 500 customers. More than 100 years later advancements in transmission technology have been mainly around stepping up voltage higher and higher to make the ever increasing distances required by building power plants out of sight of the urban centers.
Perhaps because the ratepayer picks up the tab for these losses little has been done to reduce them and the resultant CO2 emissions. Add in the enormous environmental footprint associated with thousands of miles of transmission lines hundreds, even thousands of feet wide, making the central grid ‘smarter’ is perpetuating 19th century technology into a 21st century world.
Cost estimates to improve the central grid vary widely with one suggesting $46B worldwide within the next five years. Investing just 10% of that money into developing utility scale clean storage technology would help eliminate the need for a central grid.
Producing power at the point of consumption, implementing wide scale distributed energy makes more and more sense, environmentally and economically. Smart microgrids can employ multiple renewable technologies such as rooftop wind and solar without any of the losses associated with the central grid.
Practically, it is hard to imagine a technology that wastes 2.2 kilowatt-hours for every single kilowatt-hour produced surviving into the 22nd century. Let’s hope it doesn’t, it simply isn’t sustainable. We should be imagining that next century now, hopefully one without a crisscross labyrinth of ugly transmission lines, something with thousands of independently functioning renewable energy microgrids.
*The loss figure of 2.2KWH is a cumulative number that includes heat lost at the point of generation, voltage transformers and transmission.
