If you imagine trying to tile a bathroom with the topography of Idaho and a perimeter contour with the juts and jags of a Manhattan skyline, using a bag of little tiles that undergo a quantum change in shape every ten degrees of temperature change, you a) need to rethink your remodeling budget, and b) have outdone yourself in terms of visualizing the challenge of precisely matching electrical and thermal outputs from discretely sized pieces of equipment to an agglomeration of energy loads with time-varying electrical and thermal energy demand profiles (a.k.a. The Grid).
Not only do the electrical and thermal needs of every given building change with time of day and season of the year, so do the respective quantities of energy available from a fixed piece of generation equipment- some moreso than others, and none perhaps moreso than those in the renewable family.
The Grid embraces the complexity of these details through the deployment of a strategy well-known to quantum physicists everywhere: coarse graining. Just as an apple is a seething, manifestly incomprehensible mapping of countless wavelets of energy onto time and space, (but really just an apple), so The Grid looks like an enormous and singular Chunk of electrical energy supply, (but really is a LOT of coherently entangled toaster ovens).
I see one tremendous upside to the grid being its ability to function as a “sink”, in the classical, Newtonian, Thermo One sense of the word. Right now, the Grid receives energy from a relatively small quantity of high-voltage generators, and distributes it to a relatively large quantity of low voltage consumers- namely the World’s Largest Ever Fleet of Thermostatically Regulated Toaster Ovens. The same infrastructure could also be used to agglomerate and locally equilibrate the time-varying and never perfectly matched electrical and thermal outputs of an expanded Fleet of Cogenerating-District Energy Linked-Renewable Sunshine Supplemented Toaster Oven Repositories (a.k.a. Real Estates).
It does require a certain degree of level-headedness, however.
If you have read any of the previous posts, you see we have a tendency to advocate for combining thermal and electrical generation in much smaller bits, at a location near you, thereby significantly increasing fuel energy utilization efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We have suggested previously that applying this strategy to just one half of one-third of the current Fleet, we could cost-effectively reduce the amount of fuel we consume as a nation for electrical generation by about 10% (and GHG’s commensurately).
The Title of this post refers to the fact that some collectively endorsed consensus-based decisions, sometimes referred to as “policies”, “political footballs”, “cooperation”, or “travesties” depending on your perspective, could streamline this process and allow us to access said greenhouse gas reductions. Such decisions may ostensibly include, but not be limited to, the following:
1) So-called smart-metering combined with a system of exchange that allows Owners (specifically those located in energy dense urban locations) of multi-functional generation equipment and/or of Sun and Wind Hoarding Devices, to receive time-varying compensation for electrical energy supplied to the Grid at prices more closely related to the “real” cost of energy at that 15-minute window of time.
2) Policies that allow for sharing of excess electrical energy at mutually agreed upon prices with One’s Immediate Neighbors, without engaging most of the nation’s Legal Talent to debate the Constitutional Suitability of such a heinous act.
3) A carefully considered and partially contrived Instrument for the application of our funds to the Problem of Needing (and needing to pay for) Some Certain Amount of Reserve Energy Generation Assets So Everyone Has Lights in the Event Some of the Other Assets Don’t Work.
Such unprecedented cooperation would utilize the existing grid more like a sink than just a source, and enable a more flexible and competitive marketplace for local energy generation. Or to rephrase: a Lotta’ Carbon for a Little Cooperation.
By Michael Mark, PE
