Ram Rajagopal, Pravin Varaiya and I (Le Xie) of the FlexDemand team were invited to participate in the workshop “Today’s Research for Tomorrow’s Grid” hosted by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China on Oct 15-16, 2014.
The key organizers of this workshop were Professor Felix Wu of UC Berkeley and Professor Shengwei Mei of Tsinghua. The scope was set to be a small group of participants with focused discussion on the future of the grid. There were a total of 10 or so invited talks by researchers from China, Hong Kong, and U.S.
Rather than giving the chronological order of the presentation reports, here I will attempt to provide a few thematic points that came out of the discussions:
(1) The importance of behavioral science and empirical data to understanding consumers. Professor Varaiya brought up this issue several times. It was emphasized in Professor Rajagopal’s presentation on studying different patterns of behavior using PG&E smart meter data. Depending on the geographical location of a customer (central valley or coastal), the use of air conditioning is significantly different, which, in turn, has a major impact on the potential of DR from these customers.
(2) A related hot topic of discussion was on the future of utility business. Professor David Hill coined the term “double death spiral” to describe the decline of conventional utility business model of “profit by volume”. Professor Wu’s summary of three “Future Grid” reports also suggested that the great need for a paradigm shift in the energy portfolio, as well as the business practice model for utilities. The unlocking of innovation in electricity sector could potentially save billions of dollars for consumers and utilities. This calls for the need of bottom-up innovation and disruptive technologies.
(3) In order to achieve the transition from today to the future, someone talked about the analogies between the Internet and power infrastructure. Professor Varaiya remarked that in the case of Internet, almost all the intelligence is embedded at end device level, the infrastructure is simply “dumb links”. In the evolution of electric gird architecture, innovations are likely to penetrate from bottom up, enabled by the “intelligent peripheries” such as power electronics devices and informed customers.
I left the workshop with the feeling that the “future grid” may have many different interpretations depending on the legacy system and the region’s energy portfolio. However, one thing is clear, we need to engage as much flexibility as possible from anywhere in the grid.
The key organizers of this workshop were Professor Felix Wu of UC Berkeley and Professor Shengwei Mei of Tsinghua. The scope was set to be a small group of participants with focused discussion on the future of the grid. There were a total of 10 or so invited talks by researchers from China, Hong Kong, and U.S.
Rather than giving the chronological order of the presentation reports, here I will attempt to provide a few thematic points that came out of the discussions:
(1) The importance of behavioral science and empirical data to understanding consumers. Professor Varaiya brought up this issue several times. It was emphasized in Professor Rajagopal’s presentation on studying different patterns of behavior using PG&E smart meter data. Depending on the geographical location of a customer (central valley or coastal), the use of air conditioning is significantly different, which, in turn, has a major impact on the potential of DR from these customers.
(2) A related hot topic of discussion was on the future of utility business. Professor David Hill coined the term “double death spiral” to describe the decline of conventional utility business model of “profit by volume”. Professor Wu’s summary of three “Future Grid” reports also suggested that the great need for a paradigm shift in the energy portfolio, as well as the business practice model for utilities. The unlocking of innovation in electricity sector could potentially save billions of dollars for consumers and utilities. This calls for the need of bottom-up innovation and disruptive technologies.
(3) In order to achieve the transition from today to the future, someone talked about the analogies between the Internet and power infrastructure. Professor Varaiya remarked that in the case of Internet, almost all the intelligence is embedded at end device level, the infrastructure is simply “dumb links”. In the evolution of electric gird architecture, innovations are likely to penetrate from bottom up, enabled by the “intelligent peripheries” such as power electronics devices and informed customers.
I left the workshop with the feeling that the “future grid” may have many different interpretations depending on the legacy system and the region’s energy portfolio. However, one thing is clear, we need to engage as much flexibility as possible from anywhere in the grid.