The Microgrid Solution

Last October, Superstorm Sandy provoked widespread frustration and fear after it left more than 7.5 million people in the New York Metro area without power. In the hardest hit areas, outages lasted two weeks or more; in high rise buildings, the elderly and disabled were left stranded, often without access to food and unable to flush toilets for extended periods. Meanwhile, outages throughout suburban New York and New Jersey shut down gas stations, leading to long lines and runs on gasoline in many places.

These failures led many observers to wonder if America’s aging electrical grid — once the most reliable in the world — was up to dealing with emerging climate and other challenges.

Observers of the electrical utility market suggested that the need to manage an increasingly large percentage of intermittent power generation from renewable sources, along with increased risks from events like Sandy, will require a much “smarter” grid — a grid that makes use of new information technology and automated computer controls to respond dynamically to changing conditions.

For their part, major utilities have mostly responded to the increased threat of Sandy-like events by touting their efforts to maintain service by investing heavily in storm protection infrastructure.

But last Tuesday at Columbia University, a panel of experts discussed a very different approach–one that has the potential to entirely transform how electrical power is delivered in both the developed and the developing world.

Strictly speaking, microgrids are not new. As panelist Mohommed Shahidehpour explained, a microgrid is essentially nothing more than an electrical grid that can operate from its own power without a long-distance transmission system or connection to a broader grid. Power on airplanes and ships are common examples of systems that operate as microgrids.

According to Shahidehpour, what makes the new generation of microgrid applications worth paying attention to is that that the elements of a modern microgrid have themselves gotten smart, to the point where they can easily shift loads based on different needs and desired outcomes. “The customer decides when he wants to use power, how much he wants to use.” In this way, a smart microgrid “empowers smart users.”

Shahidehpour knows what he’s talking about: as the Director of the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Initiative at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT),  he lead the installation of a campus-wide microgrid project that for the university that reduced campus baseload energy consumption by 20 percent and peak load consumption by more than 50 percent. The project incorporates on-site solar and wind generation, backup generators and an advanced system controller that communicates with building controllers, meters and smart switches and uses real-time price signals and weather reports to automatically manage demand. The IIT project is the flagship “Perfect Power System” of the Initiative, a project that envisions a transformation of the national grid by prototyping smart grid approaches though a series of microgrid projects.

Pareto Energy takes a similar approach, by designing, building and operating peer-to-peer microgrid networks. Panelist Matthew Fairy, Pareto’s director of sales, described a vision in which the national grid is gradually replaced over time by clusters of interconnected microgrids. This is the only way, he said, that we will be able to move to a smarter grid system. “The move to the smart grid is impossible to achieve in one big operational mass,” he explained, “Breaking it into bite-sized pieces — this is the future of the microgrid market.” Fairy described the shift to microgrids as analogous to the move from land lines to cellular phones — a shift that will “make the end product much more versatile and user friendly.”

Josh Milberg, a smart grid expert with Willdan energy consultants, explained that the biggest advantage of a microgrids is the ability of a large facility to optimize energy use “based on what is most important to you as a customer. You have the opportunity to optimize for reliability, for cost, for sustainability, or some combination. That is the really exciting opportunity. You have the opportunity to making decision for your own facility rather than being at the mercy of the larger grid operator, who is really making decisions to make sure that the entire grid is as stable as possible.”

Applications for smart grids are of course not limited to the industrialized world. According to the Earth Institute’s Vijay Modi, it’s worth remembering that under normal circumstances some 200 million people in India have no access to electric power at all. Combined with some 500 million people in Africa and another 200 million in other places, this means that as much as one sixth of the worlds population still does not have access to electricity.

Like Fairy and Shahidehpour, Modi and his team believe that the application of smart microgrid technology might be part of the solution, but from the opposite direction. Rather than finding ways to scale down break up giant grids into smaller pieces, he is looking for opportunities for small scale, local investment to create microgrids with local power generation and storage for communities in the developing world that aren’t yet served by utilities. He believes such systems, built in bite-sized pieces, could eventually be connected to the larger grid.

So what is preventing faster adoption? Modi suggested that the problem was that until now, migrogrid projects have been one-offs — each requiring custom engineering and individual permitting. If, however, there were a way to simultaneously permit microgrid systems for 100 blocks of similar buildings in New York, he said, it could “break the bottleneck.”

However, Modi pointed out that from the utility’s perspective, any time a customer reduces consumption or ads local generation — even if it’s form a solar panel on the roof — the utility loses revenue, while not really lowering its fixed costs, which in New York account for 3/4 of expenditures. David Roberts of Grist made a similar point recently, pointing to the utilities own research suggesting that “solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model.”

Fixed costs notwithstanding, Shahidehpour says, the increase in reliability and efficiency offered by widespread deployments of microgrids can only benefit utilities, which in many places spend millions of dollars each year to respond to a few hours of peak demand. And, Fairy added, there is no reason utilities couldn’t own and operate microgrids themselves; it’s just a different business model.

Of course, those who are in favor of microgrid adoption have every reason to try to placate utilities, without whose cooperation they are unlikely to get much done. But as Roberts of Grist put it, “these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention … A friggin’ century, more or less without innovation, and now they’re supposed to scramble and be all hip and new-age?”

Nonetheless, faced with an aging grid, growing infrastructure risk, volatile energy prices and depleting energy reserves, it seems likely utilities will be forced to adapt or face their own extinction.

A more interesting question is whether microgrid technology can truly begin to enable local communities and institutions to take charge of their own energy consumption– and finally return power to the people.

Questioning the Green Revolution

In the late 1960s and early 70s, scientists introduced a series of agricultural innovations collectively known as the Green Revolution that changed the face of global agriculture and the course of history.

They did this in places like India and Mexico by increasing farm mechanization, pumping massive amounts of groundwater for irrigation and introducing crop strains that could withstand enormous inputs of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.  Governments helped through pervasive incentives to support grain cropping in certain regions, along with energy subsidies for farmers to pump groundwater.

While this strategy appeared to stave off famine, at least for a few decades, it has also pushed those nations to the edge of a water sustainability cliff. In India, fossil water tables in the most productive farming regions drop precipitously and require ever-more energy to pump every year. Groundwater pumping for agriculture accounts for as much as one fifth of India’s total electricity consumption and was a major cause of the 2012 power failure that left 650 million people without power–the largest blackout in history. Groundwater pumping in India and other heavily irrigated regions is so huge that it may be raising sea levels and masking the greenhouse effect.

States affected by the 2012 India blackout. Map source: wikimedia commons.

But is it necessary? Recent work by Columbia Water Center scientists mapping regional water precipitation suggests that a better understanding of these patterns could provide a roadmap for more targeted surface water storage as well as guidance on how to maximize both productivity and water sustainability by planting the right crops in the right places. Research on the former was recently published in the journal of Water Resources Research, while the latter was discussed in paper published by the Global Water Forum last October.

To oversimplify, preliminary results suggest that India should stop subsidizing farmers to grow crops where they are not suited and return to traditional patterns of agriculture more adapted to local climate and soils — a lesson that will no doubt apply to most of the world.

It’s time we saw the Green Revolution for what it is — a world wide experiment with huge costs that at best worked for a few decades that has now led us to the brink of a global food, energy and ecological crisis.  Fortunately we now have the tools and information to design far more benign systems that can still feed the world — if we have the wisdom to do so.

Clean up After Yourself!

In celebration of Earth Day, each year the Tarrytown Environmental Advisory Council organizes a clean up day on which volunteers pick up garbage around the village. This year I attended with my three kids; for an hour and half, we got a glimpse of just how much waste even our relatively progressive little village manages to produce and fails to dispose of. In truth, I can’t say I was too surprised by what we found. But the experience did reinforce a couple of points:

1. Plastic is evil. This year, the clean up happens in a bigger context, as numerous villages and towns in Westchester County move toward banning retail plastic shopping bags. With this in mind, volunteers were asked to keep plastic shopping bags separate, to give a better sense of how much they were contributing to the problem. Unfortunately, most of the plastic bags we found were either full of other trash or in far too disgusting condition to carry separately. However, virtually everything else we picked up was plastic, plastic-coated or plasticized in some way. Only a portion of these were things like plastic bottles that theoretically could have been recycled. The rest were things like cigarette cartons, styrofoam coffee cups, coffee cup lids, etc. This leads to the question: to what extent is “litter” entirely a function of the presence of non-biodegradable plastic? After all, we could have left the few newspapers we found there–they’ll be worm food or birds nests within a few days. Plastic, however, is the trash the keeps on giving.

2. Public volunteer clean up makes people uncomfortable, especially if you bring your kids. Of course, it’s not surprising that people look at you strangely when stop to use the bathroom at McDonald’s with a kid in an orange vest, carrying a big blue bag and a trash picker.

Until next year, …

Are Supply Chain Issues Finally Catching Up with Walmart?

A series of leaked memos suggest that Walmart is in big trouble. As Cameron Geiger senior vice president of Wal-Mart U.S. Replenishment put it in February, “Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?” Executives initially blamed the recent increase in payroll taxes leaving customers with less money.

But leaked audio and other reports suggest a much deeper problem: supply chain management issues that are making it all but impossible to keep store shelves stocked. As one store manager said, “My camera bar hasn’t had cameras since early January. They let the merchandise phase out but nothing new comes in to replace them. We’re supposed to have 72 cameras but we maybe have 12. What are customers supposed to buy?”

I can’t help but wonder at the root cause of these issues. Are the pressures of energy, debt and “peak everything” finally taking their toll on the great “Warehouse on Wheels?”

Wal-Mart Executives Sweat Slow February Start in E-Mails – Bloomberg.