[Articles] Energy Monitoring, just a fad?

[linuxha]

In MBA school we call this "paving the cowpaths."

We could go into a very long argument of MBA vs. Engineering and we'll get no where. Suffice to say that the current infrastructure is ancient, poorly maintained and not scaling well. Neither a full MBA soultion or full Engineering solution will work somewhere the two have to meet in the middle. The smart grid idea is a good idea, the green aspect and smart meters idea is not.

 

[Lagerhead]

LOL -- I agree wtih you

We could go into a very long argument of MBA vs. Engineering and we'll get no where. Neither a full MBA soultion or full Engineering solution will work somewhere the two have to meet in the middle.

Well yes but I am both and believe that good engineering necessarily has a healthy respect for economics.

Suffice to say that the current infrastructure is ancient, poorly maintained and not scaling well.

Reminds me of a lengthy article on EMP (electomagnetic pulse) warfare and the corresponding vulnerability of the electric transmission and distribution infrastructure (regret I can't locate it at the moment). The author calls the whole of it "temporary" (!) -- all of the legacy utility poles, transmission lines, towers, generating stations, distribution facilities, substations, etc. -- and says that after it is all destroyed by EMP we will build one that is permanent and hardened. A little optimistic but makes the point.

The smart grid idea is a good idea, the green aspect and smart meters idea is not.

Amen brother.

 

[linuxha]

LOL -- I agree wtih you


Well yes but I am both and believe that good engineering necessarily has a healthy respect for economics.


Reminds me of a lengthy article on EMP (electomagnetic pulse) warfare and the corresponding vulnerability of the electric transmission and distribution infrastructure (regret I can't locate it at the moment). The author calls the whole of it "temporary" (!) -- all of the legacy utility poles, transmission lines, towers, generating stations, distribution facilities, substations, etc. -- and says that after it is all destroyed by EMP we will build one that is permanent and hardened. A little optimistic but makes the point.


Amen brother.

Oh, good, I thought I was about to have a heated debate of MBA vs Engineering. I wanted to avoid that as I can't argue that point too well.

You are very correct that real engineering takes into account economics. One of the things that drives me nuts (and that I'm guilty of) is knowing when things are good enough. We can't wait for perfect, at the same time we can't release solutions looking for a problem. On the other hand I've watched some of the extreme MBA approach charge extra for what should have been part of the service. I see a lot of this in cloud services. I think we have too many folks at the extremes and not enough round the middle.

A side note on the EMP, a friend of mine worked at Bell Labs in the 70's and one of his jobs was to 'EMP' missile silos. They would string up the outside of a silo, generate a small to moderate EMP, investigate the effects and try to remedy the problem. He simplified what an EMP was doing (basically causing ground in one location to be at X-kv and something else elsewhere, at the sub-atomic level - I think). He basically stated that he did not think it was not really possible to protect against a large EMP. Of course the earth handles EMPs (from the sun) so we may know more now but I'm willing to bet it's still very hard to do.

 

[tmbrown97]

I've managed a lot of engineers and programmers... business logic vs. engineer logic often don't mesh well. Comes from very different points of view.

Engineer - "this is the only right way to do it and it's going to take XXXXX"
Business Person - "we don't have XXXXXX - but we can give you YYY - and if you build the best you can with YYY at least we have *something*!!! we can build from there!"
Engineer - "it's not right/it won't be perfect/it'll require fixing later/it makes something else worse/ blah blah blah
Business Person - "we don't have XXXXX - but we have YYY. Build with YYY, and it'll buy us time/resources to do XXXX"
Engineer - "I'm smarter than you - you're just an idiot manager... you don't understand us and you're holding us back. There's only one right way to do this"
Business Person - "you don't get it... if we do it your way, we're out of business... may be the best damn thing ever dreamed of, but we won't be in business to show it to the world. Lets' start incrementally!"
Engineer - "a**hole - I quit"

Funny - my roots are as the engineer. People often don't understand life cycle management or getting the basics right, then expanding from there.

 

[linuxha]

I've managed a lot of engineers and programmers... business logic vs. engineer logic often don't mesh well. Comes from very different points of view.

Engineer - "this is the only right way to do it and it's going to take XXXXX"
Business Person - "we don't have XXXXXX - but we can give you YYY - and if you build the best you can with YYY at least we have *something*!!! we can build from there!"
Engineer - "it's not right/it won't be perfect/it'll require fixing later/it makes something else worse/ blah blah blah
Business Person - "we don't have XXXXX - but we have YYY. Build with YYY, and it'll buy us time/resources to do XXXX"
Engineer - "I'm smarter than you - you're just an idiot manager... you don't understand us and you're holding us back. There's only one right way to do this"
Business Person - "you don't get it... if we do it your way, we're out of business... may be the best damn thing ever dreamed of, but we won't be in business to show it to the world. Lets' start incrementally!"
Engineer - "a**hole - I quit"

Funny - my roots are as the engineer. People often don't understand life cycle management or getting the basics right, then expanding from there.

Hehe, yeah I'm guilty of being the stubborn engineer but I've had several financial institutes so I've learned the game of business/money. I've argued the build it this way (my way :rockon because if you don't it will cost you this many hours/dollars in outages. We then work out the details as to how we approach the problem. I've lived lifecycle and understand that to get anywhere you need to take steps (not a hop-skip & a jump).

I've also learned about how things get paid for and how long they really take to get approved. I learned that on an exponential network growth problem one of my customers had. What I thought would take a few months took nearly 9 months and that was an emergency.

Every engineer should learn a bit of project management, a bit of small business finance and 'politics'. I'm not sure what the last college course would be but engineers need to know how to work with people a lot better. Perhaps then the engineer can learn to talk to the person, rather down to the person (hmm, a few of the business folks might try that too ). There's a lot more to engineering than the technical aspects.

 

[hobbes487]

I just don't see a lot of consumer benefit in a utility-provided energy monitoring service

A little late to the discussion, but I thought I might be able to add to this since I was a consultant on a Smart Meter project for a large utility in California. A big reason for them wanting to implement the technology was to monitor demand. This would allow them to fire up additional power plants when demand spikes. Not only does this allow them to keep power plants off-line when not needed (since storing unused electricity is very hard/expensive) but would help avoid rolling blackouts when the supply is unable to meet the demand. That is a consumer benefit.

 

[davidfay999]

A little late to the discussion, but I thought I might be able to add to this since I was a consultant on a Smart Meter project for a large utility in California. A big reason for them wanting to implement the technology was to monitor demand. This would allow them to fire up additional power plants when demand spikes. Not only does this allow them to keep power plants off-line when not needed (since storing unused electricity is very hard/expensive) but would help avoid rolling blackouts when the supply is unable to meet the demand. That is a consumer benefit.

Could you expand on this? I've heard of lots of good reasons for Smart Meters but this isn't one of them. Smart Meters could certainly provide that information, but aren't there easier ways to do it (like monitoring some central location)?

David

 

[Lagerhead]

Could you expand on this? I've heard of lots of good reasons for Smart Meters but this isn't one of them. Smart Meters could certainly provide that information, but aren't there easier ways to do it (like monitoring some central location)?
David

Ditto. Grid monitoring and the management of generation and transmission are macro-level functions that are quite well done today by the various ISOs, cooperatives, etc. Knowing in isolation that 512 Main Street has a 10% usage increase is not going to lead to spinning another generator. And if large numbers of customers have a 10% unforecast increase in usage, this will be reflected in bulk consumption monitoring. No Smart Meters required.

Please explain how Smart Meters are useful here. As far as I'm concerned, Smart Meters are wholly unhelpful for large-scale energy management, and their intrusiveness suggests another agenda entirely.