Environmental Engineering Reference
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phonethentowhatitisnow,butthebenefits“thattoy”providedwerestilllife-changing.
Andnowtherearemorecellphonesthanlandlinesintheworld,andtheyworkjustgreat.
Perhaps the killer factoid is that there are 500 million people who don't have electricity
but do have cell phones, mostly in Africa. Cell phones have overtaken land-line use in
less than a decade and are way better at providing the service of telecommunications to
more people at less cost than the incumbent technology. Watch out for solar!
Actually, in one of those great “the truth is not what you expected at all” realities,
solar-panel penetration into the grid improves reliability. This has been well modeled in
New York State, where energy regulators worked out that 5,000 megawatts of solar pan-
els spread around the state would relieve some of the stress on the grid during times
of peak demand—for example, in midsummer when air-conditioners are turned up full
throttle and the state's requirement can approach 34,000 megawatts, causing frequent
brownouts. Lots of solar-power sources scattered around the grid could relieve local de-
mandandreducebottlenecksthatoccurwhenpowercan'tmoveacrosslongdistanceson
the grid quickly enough. When you think about it as a portfolio approach to maintaining
uptime or service, it makes sense that this works better than a system limited to a few
large plants—it's a bit like cloud versus mainframe computing.
Reliability issues will be resolved; just as AT&T puts up more cell towers, there are
ways we can evolve the grid to accept solar power. There are technical issues around
plugging in to solar because, of course, the sun doesn't shine half the time, but we can
make up for that by using energy storage systems, batteries, and other clean-energy gen-
erators. This is not easy stuff, but it's not beyond us. Ours is the country that created the
Internet—with bidirectional, multiple input information flows cleverly organized to de-
liver an answer to your every question in mere seconds. We got this electricity thing!
Oneofthekeychangesinrelationtoreliabilityistheprincipleof“flexibleandinflex-
ible generation” and how this might replace the concept of base-load energy. For now,
when we're at a tiny percentage of supply, the grid itself serves as the battery for sol-
ar power. When the sun goes down, a flexible generating resource can be turned on by
the utility to match the load while the solar electricity in the system declines. Electric
vehicles, for example, could have the power in their batteries drawn down while parked
to meet load in the early evening. This can be technically managed now with up to 50
percent solar-panel penetration, which cannot happen for years to come in most places.
After that the plan would be for solar to work with wind and demand-side management
techniques—turning off loads when the demand is high—to keep the grid stable. And
aside from that, if you had to, you could use a fast-ramping gas power plant to fill in any
need not met by the renewable inputs.
Inotherwords,youcanhaveanintelligencelayerthatmanagesthevariousinputsand
keeps the lights on, just like data centers juggle the processing power of thousands of
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