Thomas Edison and the Smartgrid
Our CAP colleague Tom Kenworthy has a column up today on the SmartGridCity project Xcel Energy has set up in Boulder, Colorado. The system integrates broadband communications with power lines to allow customers to monitor power consumption, make efficient choices, and let the power company route electricty through the system to meet needs in real time. When the project is complete, 10,000 Boulder residents will be able to monitor and control their power usage through the web or their mobile devices, potentially cutting their costs by 10 percent.
It’s also useful to consider projects like this in historical context—going back a century. Smartgrid projects will enable local, or distributed, generation of electricity, as consumers can tie their home solar panels into the grid or allow their charing hybrid cars to act as scattered storage units. This kind of micro-targeted power generation was in fact what Thomas Edison envisioned 100 years ago. Heather Rogers explained in an NYT column two summers ago:
A 1901 article about Edison in The Atlanta Constitution described how his unorthodox ideas about batteries could bring wattage to the countryside: “With a windmill coupled to a small electric generator,” a rural inhabitant “could bottle up enough current to give him light at night.” The earliest wind-powered house was fired up in Cleveland in 1888 by the inventor Charles Brush, but Edison aspired to take the technology to the masses. He made drawings of a windmill to power a cluster of four to six homes, and in 1911 he pitched manufacturers on building a prototype.
Edison’s batteries also fueled some cars and trucks, and he joined forces with Henry Ford to develop an electric automobile that would be as affordable and practical as the Model T. The Constitution article discussed plans to let people recharge their batteries at plug-in sites along trolley lines; the batteries could also be refreshed courtesy of the home windmill.
Edison’s motivations were not environmental; he wanted to sell more batteries and light bulbs. But his engineering approach would have helped make power consumption something more personal, giving consumers the incentive to monitor and economize their demand—one of the aims of the Xcel project.
Image: AP
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