Sioshansi F.P. Smart Grid: Integrating Renewable, Distributed & Efficient Energy
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mid-century, with aggregate emissions starting a steady
decline from about the mid-point of this decade. As a result
the traditional emphases upon resolving the issues of demand
growth and energy security are being both bolstered and
augmented through further critical attention to the industry
and issues such as its structure, organization, and governance.
Given that many sources of emissions such as agriculture
have a very high value but limited low-emission options it is
conceivable that a complete decarbonization of the electricity
industry will be required within a generation. Clearly, such a
fundamental transformation cannot be achieved by
exchanging supply sources without addressing the
fundamental drivers of energy demand. This underscores a
requirement to address the systemic stimulation of demand
characteristic of the history of the industry through, among
other things, empowering end-users.
Putting End-Users Back at the Heart of Energy
Decision-Making: Emergent Smart Grid and
Distributed Energy Options
The current emphasis on means such as smart meters and
dynamic pricing (see Faruqui, Chapter 3 of this volume)
conflates consumer choice with the collective response of
aggregate demand to real-time prices. However, the
emergence of more localized smart grids and distributed
energy options, often owned and operated by consumers,
effects a return to the situation operating before the
consolidation of large-scale integrated grid supply in terms
facilitating an effective voice for consumers. As end-users
more closely engage with the provision of energy, and in
some cases become providers themselves, they are then not
only better placed to provision the suite of energy services
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they have inherited as efficiently and cheaply as possible but
also to reflect upon the sustainability of these services and
whether or not they might better be either substituted for or,
more simply, ceased altogether. This can, and does, result in
the prioritization of more sustainable alternatives such as, for
example, passive cooling rather than energy intensive air
conditioning. In something of a paradigm shift signaling the
fundamental significance of these changes the U.S. Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has started to echo
these ideas. FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff identified
consumers as “active parts of the grid, providing energy via
their own solar panels or wind turbines, a system called
distributed generation; stabilizing the grid by adjusting
demand through intelligent appliances or behavior
modification, known as demand response; and storing energy
for various grid tasks”[19].
New Distributed Options
There are a promising range of existing and emerging options.
Some of these fit well within current centralized supply style
arrangements, such as large-scale wind (Hanser et al., Chapter
10 of this volume) and, perhaps, at some point in the future
carbon capture and storage fitted to conventional power
plants. Many of the most promising options that might help us
address these challenges are, however, distributed energy
ones (Hesser and Succar, Chapter 9 of this volume). These
include distributed renewable generation such as PV,
biomass, small-scale wind, hydro, and highly efficient
small-scale fossil fuel plant for cogeneration and trigeneration
applications. Energy storage is also important (Wang and
Wang, Chapter 5 of this volume) and includes novel
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possibilities such as electric vehicles (Hindsberger et al. and
Armstrong et al., Chapter 18 and Chapter 19, respectively, of
this volume). Most importantly there are demand-side options
including energy efficiency and controllable loads. These all
help deliver reduced demand growth, improve energy
security, and help reduce emissions.
Energy efficiency (EE) is particularly promising. For
example, IEA scenarios involving significant emissions
reductions by 2050 see EE playing the major role (with EE in
the electricity industry playing a particularly important role,
[18]). EE options include not only efficient equipment but
also smarter use of equipment, underlining the value of smart
grids. Controllable loads can contribute to EE but might
instead focus on moving the timing of peak demand, which
can involve tradeoffs where control for such objectives
actually reduces energy efficiency.
Distributed energy options do, however, present a profound
technical, economic, and social challenge to current industry
arrangements. Complex new technologies, such as PV, in new
locations within the electricity industry at new, small scales
require high levels of coordination in order to deliver secure
and reliable electricity flows. Smart grids, commonly owned
and operated by new industrial players, are an essential
element of this coordination of new distributed technologies.
Distributed options are often sited on end-user premises, and
some, such as cogeneration and controllable loads, require
close integration with the range of other activities that
end-users undertake. Most EE decisions are investment and
operational ones taken by end-users themselves, underlining
how the necessary decisions involve a whole new set of
stakeholders—the end-users themselves [20].
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End-User Engagement
We can distinguish a spectrum of views on smart grids and
what they might deliver. On the one hand there are, largely
utility-driven and directed perspectives emphasizing more
efficient and reliable supply, primarily via means such as
smart meters and dynamic pricing, which also share an
emphasis upon greater renewable energy deployment. This
perspective emphasizes technologies and pricing with users
largely engaged through means such as in-house displays,
time-of-use tariffs, or utility load control, rather than through
the facilitation of more substantive end-user decision-making.
Although this approach may improve the reliability and
economics of supply while also making the grid more robust
to inevitable climate change impacts, it vastly underplays the
potential of smart grids in our view.
This potential centers upon returning end-users to the heart of
decision-making within an electricity industry set to rapidly
and radically transition towards a more sustainable
low-carbon future and away from its supply-driven past. So
while on the one hand engagement is largely viewed as a
matter of mediation by technological and economic means, on
the other it is rather seen as a matter of facilitating substantive
end-user decision-making beyond pricing and technological
interventions.
It's important, however, to acknowledge that this spectrum of
views is complex and far from clear-cut. For example, the
White Paper “Energy Retailers’ Perspective on the
Deployment of Smart Grids in Europe,” written by members
of the Working Group Demand and Metering of the
SmartGrids European Technology Platform for Electricity
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Networks of the Future,
6
is subtitled “The Smart Grid is only
a platform for a Smart Energy Ecosystem, in which
Customers play the first violin.” However, the emphasis
remains upon technology and regulation, with the only major
overlap with the arguments articulated in this chapter being at
the level of institutional changes, such as those involving the
promotion of energy service providers (see the following
section). So whereas for EU energy retailers the concept of
“customers playing the first violin” remains primarily a
matter of technology and pricing we believe that such an
approach significantly underplays the potential for more
substantive end-user engagement.
6
Downloaded from: < http://www.smartgrids.eu/documents/newforum/
8thmeeting/
ETPSmartGrids_EnergyRetailers_WhitePaper_Final_ExecutiveSummary.pdf>,
31 March 2011.
Conventional views of community engagement generally
assume an economistic model of human behavior centered
upon self-interested individuals straightforwardly amenable to
economic incentivization. This is the primarily
taken-for-granted view underlying the common smart grid
emphasis upon smart meters and pricing. Interestingly,
however, conventional views also tend to assume, somewhat
antithetically, that an end-user's sense of civic responsibility,
or “green” values, can be appealed to, via information,
education, and/or marketing, so as to facilitate “smart use”
understood in terms of frugality, energy efficiency, and a
responsiveness to changing conditions (e.g., to only run AC
when required, when the sun shines, etc.).
7
However, not
only are conventional views commonly ambiguous,
privileging both economic self interest and altruistic
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collective interests, they fail to account for the complexity of
real-world consumer behavior.
7
For a recent review of these kinds of approaches see “Motivation and
Behavioural Change” in Zero Carbon Britain 2030: A New Energy
Strategy, Centre for Alternative Technology, 2010: 147–188 (available
from http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/).
Today, for example, people wash clothes more frequently
than in the past but in a far less energy-intensive manner as a
result of not only more energy-efficient washing machines but
also improvements to detergent technology that facilitate both
shorter and colder washes [21]. This complex intersection of
not only economic but also a range of cultural and technical
factors is characteristic of consumption more generally but
tends to be opaque to the economistic mindset currently
predominant.
8
As a result we believe that bringing end-users
back into energy decision-making needs to be substantive
rather than framed in narrow economic terms. Among the best
examples of the potential of such a move to date lies in the
recent history of the wind industry.
8
For a recent elaboration of these arguments detailing the broader
literature from which it is derived see [22].
Denmark is, perhaps, the leading example. A tax exemption
for generating their own electricity meant that by 2001 over
100,000 families belonged to wind turbine cooperatives
accounting for 86% of all the turbines installed in the country.
This, in no small part, accounts for Denmark's leading role as
an innovator and manufacturer of wind turbines today.
Similar cooperative models are in operation today in
Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia, with Germany and
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the Netherlands having particularly active cooperative wind
power sectors. The Hepburn Wind Project near Daylesford in
Victoria, Australia, is currently catalyzing further related
developments such as the recent proposal to establish a
community-owned wind park in Mount Alexander Shire,
Victoria.
9
Other community-based models are in operation in
other jurisdictions, particularly in the United States, most
commonly involving the developer or manager of a project
sharing ownership with landowners and other community
members. Similar models to these should be equally as
applicable to other distributed energy options.
9
See http://masg.org.au/projects/renewables/
community-owned-wind-park-in-the-mount-alexander-shire/. This
paragraph primarily drew from http://www.wind-works.org/articles/
Euro96TripReport.html and http://e.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Community_wind_energy.
While some of these projects are commercial in orientation,
many, if not most, of them reflect a corresponding surge in
recent years in small, typically local community-led
initiatives on climate change, energy use, and other
socio-environmental issues. Good examples include
Transition Towns initiatives and local CRAGs (carbon
reduction action groups). The former centers on the
development and implementation of an “Energy Descent
Plan” for a particular local area focused upon substantially
reducing local dependence on external energy resources,
building community, and increasing the availability of local
resources (of all kinds). Starting at Totnes in Devon (UK) in
2006 there are now many hundreds of such initiatives
globally.
10
Initiatives of these kinds should give many in the
electricity industry pause for thought in that they flag a
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strong, broadly based community disillusionment with the
opportunities to address current challenges such as climate
change presented by existing, primarily market-based,
structures and an enthusiastic willingness to embrace innovate
community alternatives.
10
See http://www.transitionnetwork.org/.
This disillusionment and the contrasting levels of trust
invested in more community- oriented organizations are
vividly illustrated in Figure 2.6 (note how retailers fare even
worse than utilities). Sharing and mutual trust are some of the
primary characteristics defining communities, and, as a result,
community initiatives tend to be inherently durable and well
placed to effect fundamental transitions such as that required
by the requirement to rapidly decarbonize our energy system.
One way of envisaging this transition from the
supply-side-dominated ESI systems of the past is through the
notion of “co-provision”[24], which envisages a future system
that puts consumers on a par with more traditional electricity
providers. This is further examined below.
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Figure 2.6
The levels of trust energy users place in different organizations.
Source: [23].
Market and Regulatory Innovations for Smart
Energy Use
Smart energy use can only be effective in a market and
regulatory environment favorable to the effective exercise of
consumer sovereignty, which involves a move away from the
historically conditioned supply-side oriented economistic
perspectives described above. However, initiatives that
currently do this, such as the more community-oriented and
inspired ones outlined above will remain, as they do at
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present, marginal to more mainstream market-oriented
initiatives without further regulatory and broader structural
support. This is a significant challenge because the emergence
of large-scale integrated grids and centralized generation
resulted in the disempowerment of consumers as supply-side
imperatives came to frame and shape demand-side choice in
numerous ways as the above sections have made clear. This
section explores some of the market and regulatory
innovations favorable to the facilitation of smart energy use
conceived as that involving a substantive role for end-user
decision-making.
Current Retail Markets
The primary role of traditional industry arrangements has
been to achieve cost recovery for the overall cost of supply
and to manage the delivery of electricity, viewed as an
essential public good shaped by, among other things,
available metering technologies. The common result has been
flat tariffs across time and location for particular customer
classes involving significant cross-subsidies. This is not only
economically inefficient but subject to a variety of
uncertainties and contingencies that are sometimes reflected
in tariffs adjusted to cater to certain groups of users and other
systemic contingencies (seasonal, peak, TOU, etc.).
Even in restructured industries such as Australia, retail market
arrangements are often an unfinished business, as shown in
Figure 2.7. In Australia, for example, all energy users are able
to participate directly in the wholesale national electricity
market (NEM) subject to metering and NEM membership
requirements, but all but a few very large energy consumers
currently interface with the NEM via a retailer. The tariff
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