Community and Small-Scale Grid Innovation - Smart Grid (R) Evolution: Electric Power Struggles - page 190

electricity, and identify appliances that may be operating incorrectly (and using more
electricity than needed). Of course, small-scale approaches also draw attention to the risks
associated with smart grid. In an article that urges both maintaining and building more
traditional (fossil fuel-reliant) baseload units, former power company CEO and climate
change advocate Charles Bayless argues the contemporary electricity system in North
America is among the most “reliable systems in the world, and is a product of billions
of dollars of investment and careful planning” (Bayless 2010 p. 75). He urges caution in
making fundamental changes to a system that works most of the time for most users, and
claims that relying on renewable sources of energy threatens the system's reliability and
stability. He suggests that, although smart grid technologies may minimize these problems,
they also add unnecessary complexity to the system. In the current system, he claims,
“four 1,000-MW elephants pull your system in the same direction, [but in a smart grid
system] a thousand 4-MW cats pull in different directions” (Bayless 2010 p. 81). The
varied operations that function simultaneously in the small-scale projects described in this
chapter highlight this complexity.
The same flexibility that enables participants in small-scale smart grid initiatives to
make individual choices also can exacerbate the already widening gulf between the haves
and the have-nots. As Xcel has argued, if the utility loses the relatively well-off city
of Boulder, that places more economic stress on less prosperous communities within its
service territory. In Arizona, where use of solar power is rapidly expanding, households
that have installed rooftop solar panels generate their own electricity most of the time,
and rely on the publicly available grid when they need it (Brandt 2013 ) . Because they
use the larger grid at little or no cost, they have an unfair advantage over those who
cannot install rooftop solar panels, either because they do not own their homes or because
they simply cannot afford to purchase and install the panels. Although the Arizona Public
Service Company (Arizona's PUC) has submitted a recommendation for regulatory reform
to correct this inequity, the situation illustrates the importance of attending to the details of
how smart grid is deployed and how associated regulations develop.
These examples also highlight how important it is for law and policy to keep up with
technological change. Oleg Logvinov, who serves on the IEEE-SA Standards Board and
Corporate Advisory Group, identified smart grid as “a core subset of IoT [the Internet
of Things],” which he expects to fundamentally change everything about society (Lundin
2014a ) . Loginov explained that “all the elements of smart grid, from generation -
centralized or distributed - to transmission to distribution, where the real action is, will
be nodes on the IoT,” although regulatory and standardization frameworks still need to be
rationalized (Lundin 2014a ). This is similar to Rifkin's argument that the Third Industrial
Revolution, which he sees traveling along the IoT and relying on energy produced by