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Summary For Power Design Opportunities, Try The Smart Grid 
Category Alternative Energy 
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" ... Smart Grid provides the widest range of opportunities for electronic designers across a range of hardware and software sub-disciplines (Fig. 1). To understand where the opportunities lie, though, it helps to get past some misconceptions about the Smart Grid.

It isn't about replacing old electric meters with new ones that say you're using more electricity when you haven't changed anything else in your house (see "PG&E's SmartMeter Rollout Off to Rough Start" in the San Jose Mercury News, www.mercurynews.com/ci_13774449?) or about the power company remotely turning off your refrigerator, as I've heard some people complain. It's about engineering a realistic, albeit complex, alternative to simply building new physical plants, a superficially direct approach that never attracted the necessary investment or public support.

According to the report, there are more than 3100 electric utilities and nearly 2100 non-utility power producers, including both independent power companies and customer-owned distributed energy facilities. Not counting homeowners with grid-tied solar systems on their roofs, that adds up to 4200 separate entities selling and distributing electricity over what's called the bulk power system.

The bulk power system consists of three independent networks: Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. These networks incorporate international connections with Canada and Mexico.

All told, U.S. commercial and public-utility power plants number around 10,000. Although there are "distributed energy" plants that use "waste" heat, in general, the average thermal efficiency of electrical generating plants is around 33%. Most of the existing capacity is 30 or more years old. ... "
 
Webpage More info 
Author SMPS Editor 
Date 1/13/2010 
 
 

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