The Grid of the Future

The Hack My Solar Podcast

Today we're going to talk about the grid of the future. I was at. Actually over the past year I've been at several power generation conferences where I've had conversations with people from companies like Duke Energy Southern Company which owns Alabama and Georgia Power Mississippi Power and Gulf Power. And let's see who else...Ameren over in the Midwest. I don't deal with the ones out west very much. Dynegy and Luminant over in Texas all of these guys are saying the same thing the grid of the future is coming and it's going to look a lot different than what we have right now. And it's going to surprise a lot of people how different that it is. And so when I was out this last one down in Alabama. I was talking to a guy and he was telling me that both Alabama Power and Georgia Power are creating smart neighborhoods. So these companies that make their money off of converting nuclear reactions and coal dug from the ground to energy or to heat which then creates steam which creates energy. These guys are investing quite heavily in renewables and now in what they're calling the grid of the future and so. I thought to be interesting to talk through some of that stuff today. If you go to a smart neighbor dot com that's the Web site for this program that they're doing and it's really neat. I mean it's super high efficiency appliances smart houses you know where things are voice activated and your refrigerator tells you when you're running low on milk and you can change your thermostat from your cell phone while you're at work. All of these things and then it's also there all the houses have solar panels on them. The neighborhood itself has a natural gas powered backup generator. And then there's a micro grid for the neighborhood. And what's needed about that micro grid is it allows properties that are generating an excess of electricity from their solar panels to take that and put it onto the micro grids so that another person in their neighborhood can utilize that without having to pull any electricity off of the bigger overall grid. And so this essentially creates a fully self-sufficient neighborhood. We talk about self-sufficiency a lot and how you know solar thermal solar photovoltaic systems can be part of that self-sufficiency. But this is a system that that extends out from just the house itself and goes to the neighborhood. And I think about what that might do for a community. One of the things that happened when we know they are able to take these vast amounts of energy from certain places in the country transport them on railroads to other places in the country generate electricity and then through the magic of alternating current. Transfer that electricity all over the United States and create these massive grids with this step down transformers and all these different things one of the things that that did was it created the ability for humans to exist without community. It created the ability for people to you know either move far away from other people and still have access to all the things that they really wanted. Or you know to move out of the city and away from the customs around there being everyone in a neighborhood knowing each other and talking to each other and helping each other out and getting together for cookouts and things like that you know that. Those are pretty strong customs in the in the cities and where people started moving out to the suburbs a little below that stuck around. But you know by the way the 70s and the 80s you weren't talking to your neighbor in the suburb that much. And by the 2000s you might not even know your neighbor's name. And so what I'm hoping is I look at some of these technologies and one of the things that I think about is well if you're buying electricity from me Monday and Tuesday and I'm buying it back from you Wednesday through Thursday and then Friday Saturday and Sunday when we're home you know we're sharing the grid we all go maybe four of us guys get togethe...