Today in Cleantech
In the spirit of brightening up your Monday morning with some moving pictures, I’d like to bring your attention to this actually useful animation from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and New York City utility Consolidated Edison, now up on YouTube. For people like me who aren’t electrical engineers, it’s a wonderful, easy to understand graphical explanation of just how a section of ConEd’s power grid in Queens, N.Y. works when distribution grid substation transformers go offline, one after the other — what’s called an “N-minus-2″ event — and how smart grid systems can stand in for new substations to avoid brownouts when those transformers fail. It’s important to remember that most Americans don’t know what the words “smart grid” mean, let alone how to organize a “virtual power plant” like the type the EPRI/ConEd video describes. Watching the little animated utility control room jockey choose from a set of options — smart meter-to-home energy signals, commercial and industrial demand response, distributed generation sources, grid switches and controls — also reminds us just how many different moving parts make up a truly smart grid. For more interesting virtual power plant projects around the coutnry, check out projects by utility Duke Energy and startup Viridity Energy, for starters.
