Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on October 16, 2012
Smart Cities and the Smart Grid
There are natural parallels between the Smart Grid and smart cities in terms of concepts and deployments. Both rely on ICT technologies and M2M (machine to machine) communications applications to enable devices and systems to be remotely monitored and controlled. Both are infrastructure plays that often require significant financial investments and have payback periods that are not always immediate.
But there the similarities end, because cities have much more experience at evolution than the traditional electrical grid. After all, cities have been adopting radically new technologies that disrupt the state of the art and the status quo for centuries. The Romans created aqueducts and fundamentally changed how water could be controlled and distributed in cities. Discoveries in hygiene and disease transmission and control allowed people to healthily live in population densities with minimized odds of large scale epidemics. And then automobiles exerted their benign and malign influences on cities. In each case, city systems, policies, and people changed to accommodate new technologies, new knowledge and new practices.
Just a couple of decades ago, the ability for a customer to have equipment that created dialtone (the private branch exchange or PBX) was a mind-boggling different systems approach to the old model of a central office switch delivering dial tone for all devices, which by the way, were very proprietary and closed. The technologies had changed over time, but that system model persisted. The PBX fundamentally changed the telecommunications model and market, and encouraged more opportunities for technology innovations. The culmination is the coming explosion of M2M applications. As often noted Alexander Graham Bell wouldn’t recognize the modern telecommunications networks or technologies, but Thomas Edison would feel right at home with the North American electrical grid.
Distributed generation (building-scale solar, wind, geothermal) and energy storage + energy efficient designs and materials + energy and water management systems are the grid’s equivalents of PBXs. There’s no going back once building owners see compelling financial justifications for these investments.
The evolution of buildings was a primary topic at a roundtable sponsored by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in San Francisco recently. My talk focused on the relationship between the Smart Grid and smart cities, and the Dutch delegation shared fascinating information about urban planning and development, sustainable retrofitting of existing building stock, and M2M applications to make buildings intelligent. While in the USA energy is a fraction of overall cost of living expenditures, in Holland it is about 50/50 spent between energy and housing. That motivates Dutch political leaders and business to develop policies and technologies that reduce energy consumption.
Residential and commercial buildings are dumb now, but intelligent buildings will contain M2M applications such as automated energy and water management systems and be built or renovated with energy efficient designs and materials. Buildings will become participants in energy markets. Some are already participating in demand response (DR) programs that put a value on negawatts. As regulatory policies change, more building owners will find it financially feasible to participate from a kilowatt perspective, and buildings will upload electricity that was generated or stored onsite. Buildings that operate as prosumers in energy markets can disrupt the existing business models and the systems in place that are designed for electricity flow in one direction – from centralized sources.
M2M applications will have very interesting impacts on cities, and on their commercial and residential buildings. Ambitious goals such as zero net energy buildings will change the relationships that physical structures have within cities, and in turn change the relationships that occupants (full or part-time) have within buildings and within cities.
As discussed in last week’s article, sustainable transportation leverages ICT and M2M applications to re-think how we move people and goods. The same will be true for cities – we need to think of them differently in terms of how systems and models (and our assumptions) will be disrupted by new technologies, ideas, and policies; and how smart cities will interact with the Smart Grid.
9 Comments on "Smart Cities and the Smart Grid"
Rick on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 9:20 pm
Smart meters and a smart grid, BS! One more layer, of complexity, in an already overly complex world.
Not to mention smart meters are scam.
And BTW, living in a large city in the years to come will be a huge mistake.
Arthur on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 10:21 pm
Smartmeters a scam, why? Italy is the world’s most advanced country when it comes to smart grids and smart meters (30 million installed). You cannot have decentral distributed energy production without a smart grid. With OSGP we have the TCP/IP of the smart grids:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_smart_grid_protocol
The EU now has 45 million smart meters installed and the operation underway is expected to be largely completed by 2020 with to 240 million. They are necessary from the viewpoint of rationing alone.
GregT on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 11:29 pm
“Smart Cities” will be an oxymoron.
BillT on Wed, 17th Oct 2012 3:14 am
Rick & GregT, you are correct on ALL points! Cities are doomed to fail when the lack of oil to keep them livable ends. Maybe 10-20 years max.
Haha … Europe is financially booming correct? You cannot ration what you don’t have. The Euro is taking Europe back into the Dark ages. When the squabbling and back stabbing is over, there will be no money to improve anything. Maybe not even enough to maintain what you have. But you will not be alone.
The Us will be right behind you. Roads are already crumbling in the Us. Bridges failing and being closed, permanently. Power plants being closed down. Sewer systems and water systems failing in the big cities. Electrical grids on the edge of collapse. Schools being downgraded. Food and water quality falling. Etc. It’s only a matter of time until the whole financial system collapses under the weight of unplayable debt. The reset will not be a world you are familiar with. And being in a city is not a good idea when it happens.
Arthur on Wed, 17th Oct 2012 8:43 am
What is so complicated about smart meters?! It is a simple box you can mount on a wall and pull in two plugs and that’s it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter
Smart grids… go and have a look in Germany; installed solar peak capacity 26%. And since most of the solar action is in Bavaria (50%? I am guesssing here) concentrate on that. They all have a feed-in setup and feed-in tariffs. It’s all there, it all works flawless. Nothing needs to be innovated anymore, just invest in off-the-shelf hardware.
“Haha … Europe is financially booming correct?”
No, we are not printing money like madmen… QE-1, QE-2, QE-3, QE-x –> Weimar.
“The Euro is taking Europe back into the Dark ages.”
No it is not. The problem is these Greek irresponsible children. They smuggled themselves into the euro thanks to cooked books courtesy Goldman-Sachs swindlers. Has nothing to do with peakoil, just with little kids roaming free in the candy shop. They acquired all the debt they could lay their little incompetent hands on, assuming they would be bailed out by the ‘fascists’ of the north and that’s what partially happened indeed with a haircut of ca. 50%. They should have never let in the euro. Reason: they have no state able to collect taxes. In the old days the Greek ‘government’ printed ‘money’ (shabby Drachme), resulting in an average yearly inflation of 10% or so. Not any longer as the new money is (sparringly) printed in Frankfurt by an independent central bank. So, what happens now is, all the blond guys with the black sunglasses.lol are moving in and develop a sado-masochistic relationship with these Greeks and tell them what to do or else they get no more money and they will go bust. And the Greeks scream for pain indeed. Well, let them, they deserve it. It is just the growing pains to finally develop in a serious nation. And the Greeks will do it. Do you think they want to abandon the euro? Of course not. It is the dream of every African to end up in Europe one day and the Greeks are no different. They overwhelmingly want to stay with their ‘torturers’ and do not want to fall back on their Drachme. Besides, in recent months new oil and gas deposits to the tune of $600B have been found in and around Greece. If you know that total Greek debt is $400B, than it is not difficult to figure out that there is no Greek problem. Then there is Spain. They have the *lowest* debt in Europe (65%, EU 82%, US 100% and counting $1T structural deficit/year, Japan 200%). The problem is the false investment in all sorts of resort real estate. Problematic yes, collapse threat, no.
BillT on Wed, 17th Oct 2012 9:02 am
The Euro is in a coma in intensive care and not going to last much longer. The Eu will then most likely break up into it’s previous sovereign countries and perhaps end up even worse than before that idea began because most of the economies will be wrecked. But that is what the central banksters want. They cannot get total control of the world until all of the middle classes are gone. Lords (Bankers) and serfs ( the rest of us.)
“Smart meters give more control of your life to the government who decides when to ‘power down’ your home. No? You don’t understand them if you believe you will retain that power. Ready to join the 3rd world where they have electric maybe 3 hours a day, if they are lucky, and none, if they are not?
Arthur on Wed, 17th Oct 2012 9:43 am
“The Euro is taking Europe back into the Dark ages.”
The euro was designed by France (president Mitterrand) in ca. 1990. It was a condition imposed on Germany in order to be allowed to reunite with Eastern Germany. It’s purpose was to ’embed’ Germany into Europe once and for all and that’s what happened. Germany is now pay-master of Europe. And allthough I am very pro-German, I wholeheartedly support this design (we in Holland are in exactly the same boat as Germany), as this is the only possible construction to stave off (zionist dominated) Anglo attempts to divide the continent, using Britain as a crowbar, like in WW1 and WW2. The euro is in direct competition with the dollar (ask Saddam, oh wait), and as long as the US will behave like the global hegemon (and they will until either the first american pogrom toppling the ruling cabal, after 9-11 comes out, or the onset of white separatism), the rest of the world will secretly support a growing role of the euro. Putin’s words last februari in his grand strategy paper…
http://rt.com/politics/official-word/putin-russia-changing-world-263/
… talking about ‘Euro-Siberia’: “a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros.“.
Yes, that’s right, *euros*, not dollars.
And that’s precisely what the euro is going to accomplish, the formation of an economic power, that is already the largest on the planet (wikipedia List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal))
EU 18T$
US 15T$
China 7T$
Japan 6T$
India 4T
Russia 2T
Europe, as a (temporary) political serf of the US, is in an extremely comfortable geopolitical position. We have an economy largely in balance (forget about little Greece), we have an enormous hinterland of 250 million former Soviets, rich of resources and eager consumers, willing to become our ally (because of the direct US NWO threat as well as latent Chinese demographic threat). Furthermore we have a growing US-Chinese antagonism over resources in the ME and they are the most likely candidates to clash after the strike on Iran will begin. Expect the EU and Russia to send blankets and moderating words.
“You cannot ration what you don’t have.”
You are too much of a doomer. Why don’t you have a good look at the famous ASPO curve, predicting carbon production in the rest of the century. You will see that even in 2040 there still will be 50% of the maximum carbon production of 2010 available, that’s 30 years from now.
peakoil dot net / uhdsg/
That’s the 2004 view and the reserves as even admitted by ASPO are way too much for massive die-off, certainly in the west. And since this 2004 ASPO view, the situation has changed with this fracking business and all, substantially adding to the reserves (admittedly at great cost for the environment). Combined with the massive growth of renewables, first of all in Europe, this shows that a) we will need rationing but b) that there is enough left to apply rationing to.
And if you have a look at this:
iPad = 3 Watt
Laptop = 60 Watt
60 Watt light bulb = 60 Watt 😉
37 inch flatscreen TV = 150 Watt
Average European car (Opel Astra) = 75,000 Watt
…you will understand what an enormous relief and beneficial demand destruction the killing of the car would mean. The west functioned perfectly in the fifties when most people did not have a car. It could do it again. Abandoning the car and subsequent adaption of the economy is enough to solve most of our energy problems.
BillT on Wed, 17th Oct 2012 12:16 pm
The Euro is still going down and so will the EU eventually. It is like trying to unite all of the tribes of Africa under one Chief that was not chosen by the tribes but by outside forces. Won’t work in hard times and hard times are all we have left.
And in 2050, most of the oil and natural gas will still be in the ground where it belongs because the financial structure will not be there to recover it at a price that the 99% can afford.
And energy use comparison only works if you do not take into account the energy used to manufacture that item from mines to user. It’s net energy, not gross that counts. And net energy has been falling for years. Thus the scramble to keep Capitalism going at all costs.
And I think the Dollar and the Euro’s days are numbered. Both are based on nothing but paper. No production to speak of, just number shuffling in computers. Real production has moved to Asia.
Arthur on Wed, 17th Oct 2012 1:17 pm
We will see. In 2014 we will very likely witness the split of Belgium and the UK. The elections of last sunday in Belgium were first and foremost about that topic and the Dutch-speaking Flemish overwelmingly gave the mildly nationalist Bart de Wever the green light to do it, as the Flemish are tired of paying enormous amounts of money to the French speaking Walloons year in, year out. Mind you, both are Germanic catholics, and the English, Welsh and Scots are not that different either, or the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians… or the Sunnis and Shi’its for that matter. From this alone one can easily conclude that white, black and mestizo Americans will never stay together for long, when the going gets tough, as it will. And so will Canada (English/French). At least on that we may agree.
My expectation for Europe is that the big countries like Spain, Germany, France and Italy could indeed split up in underlying entities, that have existed for centuries (Toscany, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Bretagne, Normandy, Catalonia, etc., etc.) and will become de facto independent within a European federation, a sort of grand scale Switzerland, with little inter-solidarity, but as long as there is inter-European trade, there will be a motive to have a single currency, which is certainly not going to be the dollar. I bet the euro for this reason is here to stay.
“Real production has moved to Asia.”
Export of Germany alone is about equal to that of China. Europe produces machinery, cars, planes, satellites, high speed trains, China mostly plastic junk.
“And I think the Dollar and the Euro’s days are numbered.”
Maybe, maybe not. The dollars days as reserve currency, yes. But the dollar and euro are here to stay, possible backed by gold if the central banks really screw up. But there is no problem with paper money, as long as you have a disciplined really independent central bank, with the task of keeping inflation low, like the German and to a lesser extent, the European Central Bank were/are.
“And net energy has been falling for years. ”
Yep, but that does not mean that the bottom of that process is necessarily zero.
“And in 2050, most of the oil and natural gas will still be in the ground where it belongs because the financial structure will not be there to recover it at a price that the 99% can afford.”
You keep saying that, but the reality seems to me that oil and gas will be extracted from the soil by humans as long as the EROI of that activity is big enough. Until the end of times one barrel of oil represents the equivalent of 8 manyear of physical labour, so there is an enormous upward elasticity before THAT limit has been reached, before physical labour is cheaper than that generated by oil. There is no reason why salaries/income of oilworkers, any workers, could not come down to 100 dollar per month (income of Soviet workers in 1980), if starvation is the alternative. Money has nothing to do with it and can be printed, EROI is far more important.