Smart grid cuts electricity demand 20%

Smart grid has a lot of hype to live up to, and large-scale roll-out hit some early roadblocks, but here is a recent promising result.

A smart grid pilot project in Fayetteville, N.C., has resulted in an initial 20 percent decline in average electricity consumption, according Consert, a Raleigh, N.C. technology company.

Those numbers are based on the first month of the project, a joint effort between Consert and I.B.M. that installed energy management systems for 100 residential and business customers of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, the local utility.

A brief news scan informed me that the Boulder smart grid project, which I had lost track of after it hit some early customer opposition, is apparently up and running. And obviously stimulus dollars are hard at work replicating this early success elsewhere.

P.S. In other obsolete news, Steve Chu makes his case for smart grid.

The Sahara is a long way from Europe

The idea of a massive solar farm in the Sahara, capturing some of the most intense sun rays on earth without much human or environmental impact, sounds good at first:

Today in Munich , the dozen-odd companies in the Desertec Initiative officially kicked off plans to build a $500 billion complex of solar power plants in the Sahara Desert to help bring clean energy to Europe.

Environmental Capital is concerned about a lack of alignment on the project goals; I'll just go ahead and reiterate that the trick is in the transmission.

Update: Via Green Sheet, Siemens CEO Peter Löscher has an answer for transmission skeptics like me:

SPIEGEL: Some experts have said they think it's not economical to transport solar power to Europe through huge distribution grids under the Mediterranean Sea.

Löscher: Energy superhighways can be both technologically efficient and economical. A few years ago we connected Tasmania with the Australian continent. And from 2011 there will be a 250-kilometer undersea cable supplying Majorca with electricity from the Spanish mainland. For us, this kind of thing is now part of our core business.

The trick is in the transmission

Transmission line worries have claimed another victim, T. Boone Pickens' monster West Texas wind farm:

Last year, Pickens announced that he would build a 1,000-megawatt wind farm in Pampa, Texas. The problem a lack of a transmission line to bring the juice to population centers, Pickens said in an interview last week.

"I don't think the first place we build, though, is where we thought we would because we don't have the transmission," he said.

Remember that idea he had to build his own transmission line? "It was a little more complicated than we thought," he said.

The Pickens Plan envisioned a Midwestern "wind corridor" powering America and displacing foreign oil (natural gas would become our primary transportation fuel), but power lines are starting fights all over rural America, according to DTN's Chris Clayton. And wind is not the only renewable where the optimal generating locations don't coincide with population centers - California's Sunrise Powerlink also ran into stiff environmental opposition despite its potential to deliver clean solar and geothermal energy to San Diego.

The huge political challenge of siting and permitting new transmission lines is part of why people get excited about decentralized solutions like distributed solar. Ultimately, though, there are environmental complaints about every type of power generation - manufacturing solar panels emits powerful greenhouse gases, wind power kills birds, hydro power kills fish, etc. Negawatts can only take us so far, so ultimately there will need to be a compromise and trade-offs will be made.