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Page added on May 25, 2014
Smart cities and the smart grid
A veritable “perfect storm” of challenges and opportunities is profoundly changing the fundamentals of urban areas throughout the world. The driving force is the exploding growth of urban populations caused by both global population growth combined with dramatic relocation to urban centers. The United Nations predicts a near doubling of city dwellers by 2050 as the global population increases from 7 billion to 9 billion with the urban population to grow between 2.5 billion and 3 billion people in the next 30 years.
This poses daunting challenges for planning, deployment, operations, and management of infrastructure, procurement and utilization of resources and provision of services. Within each urban area, it becomes more difficult to procure and manage the necessities of life and business—housing, transportation, water, fuels, electricity, communications, information, education, products, services—while at the same time maintaining and improving economy, efficiency, sustainability, reliability, security, health, and safety.
Fortunately, exponential improvements in the performance versus cost of electronics, telecommunications and information technologies are making it possible to address these complexities and challenges. A particularly interesting example is the advent of the “smart grid,” an especially important development since everything else in an urban area requires economical, reliable and sustainable electric power and energy.
In the U.S., for example, until recently, some 3,000 monopoly electric utilities exclusively provided power and energy to about 140 million metered customers from just over 10,000 generating plants through a nationwide patchwork of synchronous AC grids. The underpinnings of this century-old industry model had begun to fray in the 1970s and continued to erode ever more rapidly. Now, the grid is undergoing a radical transformation in which energy production, monitoring and control is moving away from the generation and transmission center to the distribution edges. If only a few percent of electric utility customers in the U.S. deploy these, there will be millions of them at the edges of the grid. This is happening even more rapidly in the majority of the world, the developing economies, which could not deploy the kind of monolithic, centralized grid infrastructure that exists in the smaller, less-populated developed economies.
Over the next decade or two, throughout the world many millions of distributed energy production, storage and management systems will be deployed at the “Grid Edge”. There will eventually be hundreds of millions, even billions of end-use devices that are equipped with autonomous intelligence and automation to optimize the economy, sustainability, reliability, and security of the electric energy economy. How can something this complex and stochastic be accommodated? It will be made possible through the electronics, telecommunications, and information technologies mentioned above…more specifically, it will be via the Internet of Things. Ditto for the many other kinds of infrastructure and services in urban areas.
IEEE is mobilizing the expertise, experience, and efforts of its membership to help the world address these huge demands on land, resources, and services associated with urban population growth. In October 2013, the IEEE Future Directions Committee launched the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative. A global, multi-discipline, institute-wide effort to provide education, insight and expertise, it also creates a forum for collaboration by all entities involved in planning and management of urban centers. Guadalajara, Mexico, is the pilot municipality in the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative.
Electricity, electronics, telecommunications, and information technologies and applications are the center of competence of IEEE. Gilles Betis, chair of the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative, says, “IEEE has cultivated a powerful and talented brain trust that can assist municipalities in addressing all essential services that need to be managed in unison, to support the smooth operation of critical infrastructure while providing a clean, economic and safe environment for inhabitants to live, work and play.”
10 Comments on "Smart cities and the smart grid"
GregT on Sun, 25th May 2014 5:48 pm
“Within each urban area, it becomes more difficult to procure and manage the necessities of life and business—housing, transportation, water, fuels, electricity, communications, information, education, products, services—while at the same time maintaining and improving economy, efficiency, sustainability, reliability, security, health, and safety.”
Interesting how the author forgets to mention one of the most essential needs of society, food. The one item that will become increasingly more difficult to produce in the quantities needed, as our supplies of oil continue to become more expensive, and less available.
Another cornucopian wet dream. We need to enter a phase of controlled degrowth, before it is forced upon us involuntarily. We are already seeing the beginnings of the limits to growth. It is not going to take another 30 years to play out.
J-Gav on Sun, 25th May 2014 6:45 pm
I’m sorry to say GregT has made a serious point here.
As if ‘Smart this’ and ‘Smart that’ was gonna save us …
‘Smart’ is not exactly what is dominant in our present socio-political-environmental configuration. “Encore un effort”… as they say in French.
No-one can say with absolute certainty what humanity is or isn’t capable of. But people will always understandably tend to want more than that uncertainty to cling to. This basic element will ultimately separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sun, 25th May 2014 7:07 pm
What we need is less complexity but the global system cannot function on less complexity do to the increasing buildup of predicaments and near predicament problems. Society needs more energy and more complexity to battle entropic decay. There is no managed DE-growth Greg except locally. Globally DE-growth will come from contraction and it will be painful, ugly, and messy. Chaos will enter the picture and we will see increasing dysfunction, irrationality, and diminishing returns. Smart growth is over because growth is over. Smart DE-growth is not possible except locally.
Makati1 on Sun, 25th May 2014 7:27 pm
BAU until it isn’t.
GregT, yep! It is the hundreds of trucks bringing food into the cities every night that makes them possible. Not ‘smart’ electric. Cities existed long before electric. Granted, they didn’t have towers over 6-8 stories high, but they did have a million plus (London, 1861, 2,800,000) inhabitants. They also were surrounded by farms that feed them. Now they are surrounded by suburbs that barely grow grass.
Techie dreams…
Boat on Sun, 25th May 2014 10:09 pm
As long as natural gas stays cheap, whats to worry. When is it going to peak?
Boat on Sun, 25th May 2014 10:40 pm
Davy, if there is a will there is a way, it’s mostly just politics.
Beery on Mon, 26th May 2014 2:53 am
“As long as natural gas stays cheap, whats to worry.”
The point is that in a post-peak world natural gas won’t stay cheap.
“if there is a will there is a way, it’s mostly just politics.”
So if I lock you in a bank vault with no food or tools, you’re suggesting you can break out before the air runs out or you starve?
Yeah, right.
Kenz300 on Mon, 26th May 2014 6:24 am
All fossil fuel prices will continue to rise as it gets harder and more expensive to develop reserves…….
Wind and solar keep getting cheaper every year…….
Climate change is real and will impact each of us.
Solar Industry Uniquely Poised to Help Fight Climate Changehttp://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2014/05/solar-industry-uniquely-poised-to-help-fight-climate-change
bob on Mon, 26th May 2014 9:25 am
I think Greg is right to an extent but I don’t know how fast things will fall apart…remember 1968? All the leaders in America were being killed? Mass bombings in the America….Nixon almost killed in a riot? I told my soon to be ex-wife that in 10 years you won’t recognize this country..She just laughed and said in 10 years things will be the same we will just be 10 years older….hard to say things can hold together a lot longer than you think….sh*t I can believe Europe has held together so long! I was telling everyone in 09 that Europe would collapse in 2 years! Five years later they are still going? Some of us have so much invested in collapse that we fail to see the big picture- it really doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow if we aren’t living today we aren’t living.
bobinget on Mon, 26th May 2014 11:01 am
History always seems more immediate when bullets are slamming into a person’s bedroom walls.
I wanted to share this Headline with you-all.
http://www.gizmag.com/thermogalvanic-harvesting-waste-heat/32212/