Getting Smart With Smarter Grids
Ram Rajagopal is an electrical engineer from Brazil. There, brownouts happened all the time, and with the heat that meant for more than just discomfort, it often meant danger. Because of how he grew up he wanted to do something different with the grid, he wanted to make the grid smarter. He’s basically developing a gird that is more flexible, a grid that can adapt to demand and load shifts so that the power goes only where it needs to when it needs to. There are a few problems with this system, however, and one of them is actually sustainable energy sources. Without better energy storage, sustainables simply aren’t predictable enough. Also, people would have to actively participate in efforts similar to some Californian smart rate programs. Another part to the solution, though, is by developed grid intelligence- that basically means developing a way to allow the grid to “make decisions” informed upon information brought in via infrastructure and the internet. For more on Rajagopal’s smart grid system, see the full article here-
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/october/smart-grid-rajagopal-10-07-14.html
