viernes, diciembre 03, 2010

Does the Future Holds a Homogeneous Smart Grid Black Swan?

Megatrends and black swans of the intelligent utility: Halcrow's Mark Gabriel and Siemens Energy's John Wilson talk about the industry's future is an insighful contribution to the power industry, written by Kate Rowland on December 2nd, 2010. Next is my response to her questions: "... let's talk megatrends and black swans. What do you think the future of our industry holds? Do you have any megatrends to add to Gabriel's and Wilson's?"

The modernization of the power industry that is being called the "smart grid" is one of the megatrends that we will witness. However, the current homogeneous end-to-end "smart grid" is bound sooner or later to experience a black swan for the lack of the needed restructuring of the industry into a heterogeneous “smart grid,” which will be friendly to the development of microgrids.

As the ongoing monolithic end-to-end "smart grid" has such a huge complexity, I respond to a LinkedIn group member comment with:

I think we need "tightly-coupled smart grid technologies," but agree with you that they should not be used to "bolster the central system."

Don't you think it may also have the potential to disassemble itself under a Black Swan event? I claim that the microgrid friendly The Electricity Without Price Controls Architecture Framework (EWPC-AF) based "smart grid" is a way to greatly reduce the said complexity.

In the post Why is there so much potential risk associated with the smart grid?, I give three comments that show how the EWPC-AF greatly reduces and better mitigates such a risk. The last comment says:

The smart grid has been made more complex than necessary, as a result of a system-of-systems architecting approach designed to protect most of utility system status quo profits, leaving practically intact their systems. That approach is summarized as: interoperability first and operability second. It can also be though as utility first and customers and society second.


José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, PhD

Creator of the EWPC-AF

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