Lets face it; residential PV needs Smart Grid Networks.
Why? Firstly, consumer energy demand continues to grow and the peaks are getting peakier. Utilities and Governments are desperate to understand, manage and change this through price signals.
Secondly, mature Utilities are increasingly turning to generation diversity to minimise risk, driven increasingly by carbon pricing. PV (along with other forms of energy) is a growing part of the mix; but with diversity comes the need to understand, manage and change things on the generation side too.
You cant just inject energy into the network willy- nilly, at scale, without upsetting the network as we are discovering in Australia. And it only took clustered residential PV systems installed in scale due to the NSW Gross FIT to cause these problems.
This is where Smart Grid Networks can help. Information flow leads to understanding, which leads to the ability to logically control. Its been hypothesised, trialled and even deployed in some places around the world, including Australia.
In its simplest form, all a Smart Grid Network consists of is intelligent data measurement, senders and receivers. So why is it so hard?
Universally it seems, the biggest issue is that everyone claims to have the best meter, transmission protocol or control logic, “that the utilities would just love”. But that’s left us with a higgedly-piggedly,mish-mash of products, methods and results around the world; we just cant seem to get it happening at scale on a common platform.
One Australian utility (Ausgrid, formerly Energy Australia) is living and breathing the nuances of trying to get Smart Grid Networks up right now. Having decided that radio transmission was their preferred solution for data, they figured they would quietly install 140m, 20M+ high radio towers between Sydney and Newcastle as the backbone of their network.
However, with the first poles just hitting the ground, the complaints, concerns and barriers are emerging. Issues such as property value, radio wave radiation, and infrastructure policy which says they can be installed without the approval of local councils, are whipping up the start of a storm.
I’m sorry, but the irony is just hilarious.
We humans can conceive of something as wonderful and beneficial as a smart grid and develop a myriad of solutions. But in 2011, the best we can come up with, with all our existing technology and infrastructure, is to insist on having to put up yet another data network along side the land lines, power lines, cable lines and cellular networks that are already there. You cant be serious.
Welcome to the era of dumb smart grids, people.
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