At first glance, downtown Fort Collins, Colorado, looks like a sweet anachronism. Beautifully preserved 19th-century buildings beckon from leafy streets. A restored trolley car ding-dings its way along Mountain Avenue. It’s safe and spotless, vibrant and unrushed.
And yet this quaint district is ground zero for one of the most ambitious energy agendas of any municipality in the United States. Fort Collins, population 150 000, is trying to do something that no other community of its size has ever done: transform its downtown into a net-zero-energy district, meaning it will consume no more energy in a given year than it generates. And the city as a whole is aiming to reduce its carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030, on the way to being carbon neutral by midcentury. To make all that happen, engineers there are preparing to aggressively deploy an array of advanced energy technologies, including combined-cycle gas turbines to replace aging coal-fired plants, as well as rooftop solar photovoltaics, community-supported solar gardens, wind turbines, thermal and electricity storage, microgrids, and energy-efficiency schemes.
It’s an audacious plan. But for Fort Collins Utilities, the local electric company, the less daring options were unacceptable. Like utilities all over the world, it is grappling with the dissolution of the traditional regulated-monopoly model of electricity production, with its single, centralized decision maker. The costs of solar and wind electricity generation have fallen to the point that countless consumers in many countries now produce their own electricity, often (but not always) with the blessing of regulators and policymakers. (...)
Customers are paying dearly for those upgrades: Electricity rates in Germany have doubled since 2002, to about 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s more than four times the price of electricity in Illinois. Many other countries are now learning from these experiences, Kroposki adds, “to make sure that solar and wind systems integrate with the grid in ways that help overall system stability.”
And yet this quaint district is ground zero for one of the most ambitious energy agendas of any municipality in the United States. Fort Collins, population 150 000, is trying to do something that no other community of its size has ever done: transform its downtown into a net-zero-energy district, meaning it will consume no more energy in a given year than it generates. And the city as a whole is aiming to reduce its carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030, on the way to being carbon neutral by midcentury. To make all that happen, engineers there are preparing to aggressively deploy an array of advanced energy technologies, including combined-cycle gas turbines to replace aging coal-fired plants, as well as rooftop solar photovoltaics, community-supported solar gardens, wind turbines, thermal and electricity storage, microgrids, and energy-efficiency schemes.
It’s an audacious plan. But for Fort Collins Utilities, the local electric company, the less daring options were unacceptable. Like utilities all over the world, it is grappling with the dissolution of the traditional regulated-monopoly model of electricity production, with its single, centralized decision maker. The costs of solar and wind electricity generation have fallen to the point that countless consumers in many countries now produce their own electricity, often (but not always) with the blessing of regulators and policymakers. (...)
The electricity industry is undergoing the same sort of fundamental change that has already transformed telecommunications and computing, says Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in Palo Alto, Calif. Recall the heyday of the telephone landline, when a monopoly provided reliable service, with few bells and no whistles. Today, a multitude of telecom providers offer more wired and wireless options and services than most people, frankly, care to contemplate. Computers, similarly, used to mean giant mainframes accessed via remote terminals. But when CPUs and memory became cheap enough and powerful enough, people could own their own computers, access and exchange information via the Internet, and leverage the power of distributed computation in the cloud.
Gellings envisions an analogue for electricity that he calls the ElectriNet: a highly interconnected and interactive network of power systems that also combines telecommunications, the Internet, and e-commerce. (Gellings first unveiled the then-heretical notion of electricity customers managing their own usage—a concept he called “demand-side load management”—in the December 1981 issue of IEEE Spectrum.) Such a network will allow traditional utilities to intelligently connect with individual households, service providers, and as yet unforeseen electricity players, fostering the billions of daily electricity “transactions” that will take place between generators and consumers. Smart appliances in the home will be able to respond to changes in electricity prices automatically by, for instance, turning themselves off or on as prices rise or fall. The ElectriNet will also allow for home security, data and communication services, and the like. [Listen to a podcast interview with Gellings on the future of the power grid.]
In addition, Gellings says, advanced sensors deployed throughout the network will let grid operators visualize the power system in real time, a key capability for detecting faults, physical attacks, and cyberattacks and for preventing or at least mitigating outages.
While distributed generation is already taking hold in many places, Gellings notes, “we have to move toward a truly integrated power system. That’s a system that makes the best use of distributed and central resources—because central power generation is not going to go away, although it may change in shape and form.” [For more on the undesirability of grid defection, see the sidebar, “The Slow Death of the Grid.”]
A highly intelligent and agile network that can handle the myriad transactions taking place among hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual energy producers and consumers isn’t just desirable, say experts. It has to happen, because the alternative would be grim.
Just ask the Germans. Generous subsidies, called feed-in tariffs, for renewable energy resulted in the country adding 30 gigawatts of solar and 30 gigawatts of wind power in just a few years. On a bright breezy day at noon, renewables can account for more than half of Germany’s generated electricity.
“That sounds like a good thing, but to the utility, it looked like a huge negative load,” notes Benjamin Kroposki, director of energy systems integration at theNational Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. When a large amount of renewable power is being generated, the output of conventional central power plants is correspondingly reduced to keep the system balanced. But if a local outage or a voltage spike or some other grid disturbance occurs, protective circuitry quickly shuts down the photovoltaics’ inverters. (Inverters are semiconductor-based systems that convert the direct current from the solar cells to alternating current.) And that in turn can lead to cascading systemwide instabilities.
“If you lose 30 gigawatts in just 10 cycles”—two-tenths of a second, that is—“you can’t ramp up conventional generators quickly enough to compensate,” Kroposki notes. So the Germans had to spend the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars on smarter inverters and communication links that would allow the PV arrays to automatically ride through any disturbances rather than simply shut down.
Gellings envisions an analogue for electricity that he calls the ElectriNet: a highly interconnected and interactive network of power systems that also combines telecommunications, the Internet, and e-commerce. (Gellings first unveiled the then-heretical notion of electricity customers managing their own usage—a concept he called “demand-side load management”—in the December 1981 issue of IEEE Spectrum.) Such a network will allow traditional utilities to intelligently connect with individual households, service providers, and as yet unforeseen electricity players, fostering the billions of daily electricity “transactions” that will take place between generators and consumers. Smart appliances in the home will be able to respond to changes in electricity prices automatically by, for instance, turning themselves off or on as prices rise or fall. The ElectriNet will also allow for home security, data and communication services, and the like. [Listen to a podcast interview with Gellings on the future of the power grid.]
In addition, Gellings says, advanced sensors deployed throughout the network will let grid operators visualize the power system in real time, a key capability for detecting faults, physical attacks, and cyberattacks and for preventing or at least mitigating outages.
While distributed generation is already taking hold in many places, Gellings notes, “we have to move toward a truly integrated power system. That’s a system that makes the best use of distributed and central resources—because central power generation is not going to go away, although it may change in shape and form.” [For more on the undesirability of grid defection, see the sidebar, “The Slow Death of the Grid.”]
A highly intelligent and agile network that can handle the myriad transactions taking place among hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual energy producers and consumers isn’t just desirable, say experts. It has to happen, because the alternative would be grim.
Just ask the Germans. Generous subsidies, called feed-in tariffs, for renewable energy resulted in the country adding 30 gigawatts of solar and 30 gigawatts of wind power in just a few years. On a bright breezy day at noon, renewables can account for more than half of Germany’s generated electricity.
“That sounds like a good thing, but to the utility, it looked like a huge negative load,” notes Benjamin Kroposki, director of energy systems integration at theNational Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. When a large amount of renewable power is being generated, the output of conventional central power plants is correspondingly reduced to keep the system balanced. But if a local outage or a voltage spike or some other grid disturbance occurs, protective circuitry quickly shuts down the photovoltaics’ inverters. (Inverters are semiconductor-based systems that convert the direct current from the solar cells to alternating current.) And that in turn can lead to cascading systemwide instabilities.
“If you lose 30 gigawatts in just 10 cycles”—two-tenths of a second, that is—“you can’t ramp up conventional generators quickly enough to compensate,” Kroposki notes. So the Germans had to spend the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars on smarter inverters and communication links that would allow the PV arrays to automatically ride through any disturbances rather than simply shut down.
Customers are paying dearly for those upgrades: Electricity rates in Germany have doubled since 2002, to about 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s more than four times the price of electricity in Illinois. Many other countries are now learning from these experiences, Kroposki adds, “to make sure that solar and wind systems integrate with the grid in ways that help overall system stability.”
by Jean Kumagai, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: New Belgium Brewing
