5:58 AM
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Thanks to Seth Handy for this excellent post, which we will do over two days. We encourage you to send us material for the blog as well.
Also, we'll follow up with a story on this. Clearly, the costs of not changing how power gets to the grid, then to us, is staggering. We applaud the Rocky Mountain Institute for this excellent post:
We will finish this tomorrow, but you can read the entire article here: http://blog.rmi.org/blog_A_Crisis_Terrible_Thing_Waste
A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste
"Beginning on June 29th, a brief but violent storm swept from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic, disabling electricity to the masses. The storm toppled trees and branches into power lines and knocked out transmission towers and electrical substations, leaving more than 3.8 million people without power, some for more than a week.
The recent heat wave compounded the issue. The sweltering 100+ F temperatures made the loss of electricity almost unbearable. Pepco, the utility serving Maryland and the District of Columbia, alone spent an estimated 300,000 man-hours to restore power to all of its customers.
But if indications from climate models are correct, increasingly extreme weather events may become the new normal, forcing us to reevaluate the ability of the electric grid to keep the lights on and the ice cream frozen.
Hot Temps and Wild Storms: Recipe for Outages
Heat waves and storms have always existed, and to date, the grid has survived more or less intact. Moreover, very few scientists would go so far as to say that climate change had caused a specific storm or a specific temperature record.
However, not recognizing that temperatures are increasing is a dangerous proposition. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration recently released its state of the climate report, noting that the 12-month stretch between July of 2011 and June of 2012 was the warmest year in the contiguous United States since recordkeeping began in 1895.
Not surprisingly, since January 1st, wildfires fires have incinerated more than 2.7 million acres across the U.S., threatening lives and property. In RMI’s home state of Colorado, the Waldo Canyon blaze near Colorado Springs destroyed more than 340 homes, and is on record as the most destructive fire in the state’s history.
As temperatures rise, so do the risks of electricity outages. To support the growing demand for cooling requirements, grids will become increasingly congested and prone to failure. Stopgap solutions (building more gas plants to power the increased demand) are possible, but may only worsen the effects of climate change, creating a vicious cycle fueled by our reliance on fossil fuels to power our lives.
To make matters worse, the grid is aging and vulnerable even without natural disasters. Last year, the entire Southwestern United States experienced a 1.6 million-person blackout when a single worker accidentally tripped a transmission line. (Yet the University of California San Diego’s microgrid was able to keep many lights on; watchvideo to find out how.)
Identifying the Opportunity
It’s time to kill two birds with one stone. The grid needs to be upgraded and powered with cleaner sources of power. Fortunately, we can simultaneously adapt to a more flexible and reliable grid while also reducing electricity’s contribution to climate change. The National Renewable Energy Lab recently concluded that it is entirely possible for renewable technologies to supply more than 80 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2050. NREL is not alone. InReinventing Fire, RMI outlines how a highly renewable and reliable grid is not only possible, but also cost competitive.
However, to achieve these visions of the future, significant investments in the control and management systems in the distribution grid are needed. Luckily, emerging technologies are opening up a world of possibilities..."
