Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities - Softcover

Fox-Penner, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610915895 ISBN 13: 9781610915892

Verlag: ISLAND PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Few industries in the U.S. are as stuck in the past as our utilities are. In the face of growing challenges from climate change and the need for energy security, a system and a business model that each took more than a century to evolve must now be extensively retooled in the span of a few decades. Despite the need, many of the technologies and institutions needed are still being designed or tested. It is like rebuilding our entire airplane fleet, along with our runways and air traffic control system, while the planes are all up in the air filled with passengers.

In this accessible and insightful book, Peter Fox-Penner considers how utilities interact with customers and how the Smart Grid could revolutionize their relationship. Turning to the supply side, he considers the costs of, and tradeoffs between, large-scale power sources such as coal plants and small-scale power sources close to customers. Finally, he looks at how utilities can respond to all of these challenges and remain viable, while financing hundreds of billions of dollars of investment without much of an increase in sales.

Upon publication, Smart Power was praised as an instant classic on the future of energy utilities. This Anniversary Edition includes up-to-date assessments of the industry by such leading energy experts as Daniel Estes and Jim Rogers, as well as a new afterword from the author. Anyone who is interested in our energy future will appreciate the clear explanations and the in-depth analysis it offers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Fox-Penner, Ph.D., is a consulting executive and an internationally recognized authority on energy and electric power industry issues. He is a Professor of Practice in the Questrom School of Management and the Director of Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy. 

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Smart Power

Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities

By Peter Fox-Penner

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Peter Fox-Penner
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-589-2

Contents

CHAPTER ONE The First Electric Revolution, 
CHAPTER TWO Deregulation, Past and Prologue, 
PART ONE The Smart Grid and Electricity Sales, 
CHAPTER THREE The New Paradigm, 
CHAPTER FOUR Smart Electric Pricing, 
CHAPTER FIVE The Regulatory Mountain, 
CHAPTER SIX The (Highly Uncertain) Future of Sales, 
PART TWO Supply Side Challenges, 
CHAPTER SEVEN The Aluminum Sky, 
CHAPTER EIGHT The Great Power Shift, 
CHAPTER NINE Billion Dollar Bets, 
PART THREE Business Models for the New Utility Industry, 
CHAPTER TEN Energy Efficiency: The Buck Stops Where?, 
CHAPTER ELEVEN Two and a Half New Business Models, 
CHAPTER TWELVE The Smart Integrator, 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Energy Services Utility, 
Conclusion, 
Technical Appendix A, 
Technical Appendix B, 
Technical Appendix C, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Abbreviations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The First Electric Revolution

IN 1885, Muncie, Indiana, was a typical midwestern city. The rhythms of the city were set by the sun and the canter of horses pulling wagonloads in from the surrounding farms. The largest factory belonged to the Ball brothers, makers of the much beloved canning jars. By night, the city's only light came from smoky, flickering gas lamps. The countryside relied on candles and kerosene.

Over the next four decades, electricity transformed Muncie as it transformed the world. Shopkeepers found that smokeless electric lights were far better for attracting customers and less damaging to their goods. For the first time, mothers could allow their children to read alone at night, free of the fear of accidental but frequent lantern fires. The streets of Muncie were illuminated, and a system of twenty-five fire alarm boxes alerted the fire department much faster than a messenger could be sent by saddle.

Electricity, too, changed the Ball brothers' factory. Before 1900 a team of two glass blowers and three preteen boys worked by hand to make 1,000 jars a day. The electric machines that replaced these workers took eight men to run and—in the same amount of time—produced 42,000 jars. Historian David Nye writes, "In Muncie's foundries men seldom carried heavy loads, because an overhead crane with a powerful electromagnet could carry materials from one end of a plant to the other in less than two minutes. Three men operating it could do the work that previously required thirty-six strong day laborers."

Insull's Industry

As Muncie and thousands of other cities electrified, one man was smiling. It was not Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, or any of the many other electric inventors or financiers of the era. It was Samuel Insull, the son of an English lay preacher, who devised an industry structure and business model that enabled electricity to embark on an unbroken century of growth.

Insull rose from the personal staff of Thomas Edison to become CEO of one of the earliest utility holding companies, Commonwealth Edison. Along the way he mastered beyond all others the technology and economics of power demand and supply, the importance of utility regulation, and the value of different business and financial structures.

Insull's visions of the industry rested on four pillars. First, it was cheaper to serve customers when their power use was aggregated via the largest possible web of interconnections—the system we now call the grid. Insull termed this the massing of consumption. The second pillar was economies of scale in production, or the industry's natural monopoly attributes. Today some of these scale effects have faded, but they were immutable in Insull's days and for decades thereafter.

When one's costs go down as supply goes up, what is the logical sales strategy? Sell more and charge less. Insull and the industry's finest marketing force sang "the gospel of consumption," urging customers to buy ever more power and giving them discounts when they did. This was pillar number three.

Finally, Insull recognized that an industry with declining costs, high capital needs, and intensive political interaction would gain stability and protection from regulation. He wrote:

For my own part, I cannot see how we can expect to obtain from the communities in which we operate, or from the state having control over those communities, certain privileges so far as a monopoly is concerned, and at the same time contend against regulation.

In league with progressives like Robert M. La Follette, Sr., who favored government control over trusts and other critical industries, a system of independent state agencies was established to oversee utilities and their rates.

Insull pursued his vision ceaselessly, acquiring and combining small power systems around the United States. The rest of investor-owned systems followed suit. A scattered collection of small power plants owned by municipal governments and individuals became an industry of huge, centralized utilities, with roughly one-third remaining in its original ownership form. Insull's vision of large supply, massed demand, increased consumption, and regulated rates reigned supreme. And without it, electrification might not have happened.

Insull, perhaps more than any other single person, changed American life. Over the span of the next four decades, nearly every urban home and shop got electric power and lights. Housewives who had spent an entire day doing the wash could now start an electric machine that finished in an hour. Factories saw productivity gains as high as one hundred times pre-electric levels. With a radio at the hearth of nearly every American household, and theaters soon to have electric sound and later air conditioning, came the birth of mass communication and the modern entertainment industry.

Electric power became fundamental to our military strength. Well before World War II began, war planners called for a massive expansion of power production. During the war years the War Production Board closely directed the building of transmission lines and new federal hydroelectric facilities, especially in the Columbia and Tennessee river valleys. Among other customers, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) supplied massive quantities of power to the secret Tennessee laboratory that built Little Boy and Fat Man, the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By that same year, U.S. electricity usage had increased 60% above prewar levels, introducing additional economies of scale that had not been possible during the Great Depression.

In the decades following the war, electrification permeated every facet of the American economy. The maximum rating of a turbine generator has grown by a factor of 1,000 since the power age of America began. The number of personal computers installed worldwide hit the one billion mark in June 2008. Patients in intensive care are wired to as many as a dozen electrical devices. Warfare is increasingly electronic. Video screens are everywhere—even in elevators, where the average viewer watches them for thirty seconds. The average American home used approximately 138 kilowatt-hours a month in 1950; today the number is closer to a thousand (1 kilowatt-hour is ten hours of a 100-watt fluorescent bulb or about half a load of laundry).

In 2003 the National...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISLAND PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1610915895
• ISBN 13: 9781610915892
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 343
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland