China pours money into smart grid technology

by Melanie Hart.

Cross-posted from Center for American Progress.

There is no way to get around this fact—China aims to modernize its energy infrastructure at home and dominate clean energy technology markets abroad. At the 2011 Smart Grid World
Forum in Beijing late last month, China’s State Grid Corporation
announced plans to invest $ 250 billion in electric power infrastructure upgrades over the next five years, of which $ 45 billion is earmarked [PDF] for smart grid technologies.  According to its three-stage plan, China will invest another $ 240 billion between 2016 and 2020 (including another $ 45 billion
toward smart grid technologies) to complete the build-out of a
“stronger, smarter” Chinese power grid.

When complete, this system will improve energy efficiency, lower
carbon emissions, and give Chinese consumers more control over their
utility bills. Chinese leaders are betting that upgrading to a smarter
electricity grid will also drive technology innovation and move the
country up the manufacturing value chain. The Chinese view smart grid
technology as the next industrial revolution—and they want to make sure
that once other countries start upgrading their own grids, they will buy
most of their equipment from China.

This issue brief details why the United States should take note of
China’s ambitions and step up our own smart grid efforts. We, too, need a
stronger, smarter electricity grid, and in many smart grid sectors, our
enterprises are already producing the best technologies. All they need
is a bit more policy support at home to speed up interoperability, to
drive down equipment prices, and to ensure the smart grid revolution
will be a market driver not only for China, but also for the United
States, both at home and in export markets abroad.

What is a smart grid and why does China need one?

The main difference between a smart grid and a conventional grid is that smart grid components (similar to
smartphones) are upgraded to include sensors, computers, and a wireless
interface.  That means the bits and pieces of the electric grid—the
transmission wires, transformers, distribution wires, and usage
meters—transmit and distribute electricity more efficiently and reliably
to end users, and they can also report back on how that process is
going and adjust operations along the line to fit changing conditions.

This smart functionality is critical for integrating key elements of a clean energy future, such
as renewable power generation and electric vehicles. Unlike traditional
coal-fired power, renewable power can be decentralized (multiple wind
farms instead of one massive coal-fired power plant), and is often
weather dependent. Conventional grid systems are designed to transfer a
steady and predictable flow of power from point A to point B. When a
thunderstorm reduces solar panel output or increases wind turbine
output, those power fluctuations can trigger blackouts and burnouts in a
conventional grid system. But a smarter grid can adjust, either by
storing excess energy in batteries until it is needed, or by moving power
more efficiently across longer distances.

Smarter grids are also better at handling higher and more variable
demand loads, and that will be critical when more electric vehicles are
added to the system. Current consumer demand is very predictable, so
utility companies know exactly what times of the day to purchase and
distribute extra power to counteract daily peaks. Electric vehicles
likely will not follow traditional consumption patterns—meaning demand
peaks will be harder to anticipate—and that will create new operational challenges [PDF] that will be hard to address without a more automated system.

The Chinese need more clean energy to meet their escalating
electricity demand, and that will require a smarter grid. China is now
the world’s largest electricity consumer, and Chinese demand is expected to double over the next decade, and triple by 2035. Their current energy mix is heavily dependent on coal—around 70 percent of overall consumption in 2010—and coal supply and price fluctuations
are threatening economic growth. In 2011, for example, coal shortages
forced China’s national economic planner, the National Development and
Reform Commission, to begin rationing electricity in April, months ahead of the normal summer peak.

To comply with the rationing, officials in China’s power-hungry industrial regions cut off power to small enterprises from 5:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily, and to
medium-sized enterprises every few days. This forced many small- and
medium-sized companies to operate only at night or to rely on pricey
gas-fired power generators to keep their businesses running.

The only way Chinese leaders can keep their economy growing at
current rates is to bring in more renewable energy power onto their
national grids. Their latest targets call for the country to increase
renewable energy to 9.5 percent of overall consumption by 2015, and a smarter electricity grid will be critical for integrating those supplies into the system.

The Chinese are also grappling with a major geographic issue. Energy
supplies are concentrated in the west (including coal, natural gas,
hydropower, and large wind farms), but demand is concentrated in the
east, which creates major transportation challenges. China’s
west-to-east grid infrastructure is already overloaded, so coal supplies
are often shipped via rail and road. Problem is, transport bottlenecks are so bad that in 2010, coal trucks triggered a monthlong traffic jam on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway.

To relieve congestion, the Chinese want to shift more west-to-east
transport to the grid, so a large chunk of China’s upcoming grid
investments (around $ 78 billion out of the $ 250 billion mentioned above) will go toward cross-country ultra-high-voltage transmission lines.

Killing two birds with one stone: China’s international technology ambitions

As is the case throughout the green energy sector,
Chinese leaders are betting that if they can roll out a smarter
electricity grid before the United States, China can not only address
their domestic energy challenges but also get a head start on technology
standardization. And they see standardization as a critical step toward
moving up the value chain and playing a stronger role in global
technology markets.

China’s electricity market is divided geographically. China’s State Grid Corporation controls 88 percent of the country and serves more than 1 billion customers,
and State Grid wants to leverage that position to become a global smart
grid standard-setter. Smart grid networks involve hundreds of new
technologies, from wireless sensors and smart meters to high-voltage
transmission technologies, electrical vehicle charging stations, and
many others. State Grid is aiming to dominate many of those industries,
not only in China but also abroad.

In June 2010 State Grid issued its own proprietary equipment standards for 22 different critical smart grid technology solutions.  Equipment manufacturers must abide by those proprietary standards to become State Grid vendors,
and since State Grid is the biggest smart grid customer in the world,
equipment manufacturers have a strong incentive to comply.

In most markets, equipment based on proprietary standards such as the
ones State Grid would like to see developed for its forthcoming smart
grid do not have good economies of scale because their equipment is
expensive to produce and less competitive compared to equipment based on
global standards. State Grid is betting that the Chinese market is big
enough (and they themselves control so much of it, including both
transmission and distribution) that they can use their massive
purchasing power to achieve economy of scale and drive down
manufacturing prices on their own.

Then, once Chinese manufacturers (many of which are State Grid subsidiaries) are churning out
competitively priced smart grid products, they can export those same
products to overseas markets such as the United States—and if those products are based on State Grid
proprietary standards and intellectual property, the company will
profit from every unit sold.

It is not yet clear how strongly China’s national leaders support
State Grid’s one-grid-to-rule-them-all technology ambitions. Some in
China are calling for a new round of restructuring to make the market
more competitive and to reduce State Grid’s massive purchasing (and
therefore standard-setting) power. China’s National Development and
Reform Commission recently called for a new round of trials to experiment with splitting up electricity transmission and
distribution.  If they proceed with those reforms, that will take a big
chunk of the market away from State Grid.

No matter how they divide the market at home, however, Chinese leaders have already elevated smart grid development to a strategic national priority.  Smart grid technologies are also considered a “strategic emerging industry.”
Overall, that means that whoever drives the market, whether it is State
Grid acting alone or a more diversified group of Chinese enterprises,
Chinese leaders will provide strong policy support, and China’s massive
domestic demand will ensure that the country becomes a major player in
global technology markets.

Implications for U.S. competitiveness

China’s aggressive smart grid plan poses problems and promise for the United States. On the one hand, U.S. companies currently have
the most advanced smart grid technology across the value
chain—technology that could create big opportunities in China. State
Grid is already working with General Electric Co., Honeywell International Inc., IBM Corp.,
and other U.S. companies on joint standardization projects. If those
projects go well, then at least some of China’s smart grid investments
could go toward purchasing U.S. products and paying U.S. technology
licensing fees.

On the other hand, China’s indigenous innovation program calls for reducing the country’s dependence on foreign technology to 30 percent or below (down from the current 50 percent). That program
focuses particularly on strategic emerging industries such as the smart
grid.  That means we should expect the Chinese to favor homegrown
standards wherever they can, particularly when the foreign versions are
more expensive. That could make it harder for U.S. smart grid equipment
and services to gain a foothold, not only in China but also globally.

Where there are competing international standards, the Chinese will
face trade sanctions if they adopt State Grid’s proprietary, homegrown
solutions as compulsory national standards and blatantly shut foreign
technology out of their market. In mobile telecommunications, for
example, China developed a homegrown 3G wireless standard, but Chinese
regulators had to recognize and issue domestic operating licenses for
all of the major international standards, not just the homegrown technology. In the smart grid market, however, international standardization is moving rather slowly, particularly in the United States, and that
gives China more leeway to adopt homegrown solutions as their national
standards and to leverage their domestic buying power to drive down
costs and promote those technology solutions abroad.

The United States should not aim to compete with the Chinese on
electric infrastructure investment. State Grid’s investment commitments
are impressive, but a lot of that spending will go toward catching the
Chinese up to where the United States is now. Their grid infrastructure
is less developed than ours, so it is inevitable that they will have to
spend more, and it is inevitable that those expenditures will make China
a very attractive market for smart grid equipment manufacturers and
private investors.

One thing we can do to improve U.S. competitiveness is to speed up our own standardization program [PDF].
Most U.S. smart grid solutions are not yet based on common standards.
That means that just like the pre-interoperability computer era (when
your desktop computer, monitor, keyboard, and printer would only work
together if they were all from the same manufacturer), U.S. smart grid
technologies are hard to mix and match, and that drives up prices and
stifles competition.

The United States is working to improve interoperability [PDF], but the process is very slow. China boasts only two utility companies,
but there are more than 3,000 in the United States, and those companies
are not used to working together. Our utility regulators are also not
used to dealing with technology standardization.

The federal government can speed up interoperability by playing a
stronger coordinating role at the national level to help our state and
local utility regulators move toward common standards and interoperable
(and therefore cheaper) equipment. The United States has already figured
out how to do this in telecommunications and information technology; we
just need to apply the same lessons to the electricity sector.

One thing the Chinese get right is using policy signals to stimulate private investment, and that is something we can do in the United
States as well.  When Chinese leaders included smart grid development in
the 12th five-year plan and State Grid announced its ambitious spending
plans, those moves kicked off a new wave of private Chinese venture capital investments in their domestic smart grid technology companies.

We can encourage more private investment in our own smart grid
infrastructure and companies by sending stronger policy signals here in
the United States. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
was a big step forward—that funding [PDF] was the biggest driver of U.S. smart grid market development to date,
and it also jump-started the U.S. standardization process. But more work
is needed. We do not yet have a strong federal champion to coordinate
the different policy and industry stakeholders working on smart grid
technologies, and that coordination is particularly critical in this
sector, because these technologies cut across traditional regulatory and
industry divides (power generation, electric utilities,
telecommunications, and information technology).

We are also still working to fine-tune the existing investment
incentives. Some U.S. telecom companies complain that the Recovery Act
gives utility companies incentives to build out their own proprietary
smart grid wireless communication networks instead of utilizing the
existing wireless infrastructure, which is based on common standards and
interoperable equipment. The more we utilize common standards and
interoperable equipment, the more we can improve our economy of scale
and lower production costs for U.S. manufacturers—and that will lower
infrastructure costs here at home and make U.S. technology and equipment
more attractive in overseas markets.

Our path to a stronger, smarter electricity grid is actually much
easier than China’s. Since our grid systems are already more advanced,
we can target our investments toward developing and deploying the latest
and greatest smart grid technologies instead of playing catch-up. That
means our market can be a much stronger driver for technology
innovation, and we can get more economic bang for every smart grid buck.

To take advantage of this lead, we should work toward clarifying our
standard-setting process and removing existing policy bottlenecks to
smart grid deployment. Then, like the Chinese, we can leverage a
stronger, smarter grid to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, to
drive innovation, to create jobs, and to give consumers new options for
saving money on their utility bills.

Those are goals that we can all get behind.

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In the meantime, the St Ives house, close to the junction of the A1123 and Ramsey Road, would continue to showcase the sort of technologies that would be fundable by the Green Deal. The St Ives house, which has a much larger range of installed …
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Big wind farms cost more than small ones

by John Farrell.

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project.

It seems obvious: Every extra turbine in a wind farm comes at a
lower incremental cost, making the biggest wind power projects the most
cost effective. 

If you bet $ 20 on that proposition, you just lost $ 20.

Instead, data from the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2009 Wind Technologies Market Report by Ryan Wiser and Mark Bolinger (a must-read) blows a hole in the
conventional wisdom that bigger is better.  The report shows that wind
projects between five and 20 megawatts have the lowest installed cost per watt of any size wind project.

There
are a few plausible explanations. For one, the economies of scale for
ever-larger wind projects are limited. At some point, the marginal cost
of an additional turbine is much like the previous one. The 500th wind
turbine is likely the same price to install as the 499th.

Furthermore,
there may be disproportionate costs for larger wind projects. For
example, projects over 20 megawatts must by processed by the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a more onerous step than smaller
projects being handled at the state level. Additionally, projects of
inordinate size may require special financing that only a few large
firms can handle, adding a price premium. Finally, large projects may
only be possible with the addition of new transmission line capacity,
both a costly and time-consuming process.

Whatever the reason, the
conventional wisdom of “bigger is better” does not hold with wind power
in the United States. And the cost advantage of modest-sized wind
power projects may open up opportunities for local ownership, like
the seven-turbine South Dakota Wind Partners project, with its 600 South Dakotan owners. The prospect isn’t just
good for the cost of wind power, but for clean energy and the economy. Not only do locally owned projects like Wind Partners bring more public support for wind, they also garner significantly greater local economic benefits.

In wind power, the best policy is to “go local.”

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Who you gonna call? GrowthBusters! [VIDEO]

by Lisa Hymas.

The
new documentary GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth explores why our economy and footprint and population can’t keep on expanding
forever. It features green luminaries galore—Jane Goodall, Paul Ehrlich, Lester
Brown, Raj Patel, Bill McKibben, Hunter Lovins. And, in the decidedly
non-luminary category, I make a brief appearance too, talking about population and
my decision to go childfree. Watch the trailer: 

If
you’re in the D.C. area, you can catch the premiere screening on Nov. 2. If
not, check out the screening
schedule to find out if the film is coming to your town soon. Or buy it yourself on
DVD.

If
you’d like to delve further into our growth dilemma, I recommend the new book The
End of Growth by Richard Heinberg, known for his warnings about Peak Oil and Peak
Coal. The book may freak you out—our current economic and social systems are poised
for total collapse, he argues—but it’ll leave you wiser.

For
a lighter and shorter perspective on our growth quandary, listen
in on this
conversation in David Roberts’ head.

This is the latest in a series of GINK videos about population
and reproduction (or a lack thereof). It’s also part of Grist’s 7
Billion series.

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