Why Machines Need to Talk to Each Other, and to Us

I recently interviewed Mark Kapner, a senior engineer at the Texas utility Austin Energy, about some myths in the clean-energy conversation. The conversation got me thinking about the communications gap in our system for generating electricity—a gap that leads utilities to operate as though they were always on the verge of peak demand.

“What utilities need is a mix of resources to assure that they can match supply to demand at all times,” Mr. Kapner said. “Those resources will be a mixture of dispatchable generating units and non-dispatchable units—such as wind and solar—as well as energy storage and controllable demand, now termed demand-response.”

But that’s not how the system works now. Because utilities don’t always get accurate information about what users need, historically they have made sure they can handle spikes in demand by always being over-prepared. The system as it exists is extraordinarily dumb.

Richard Johnson, the director of sustainability for Rice University, sees a similar issue in the mechanical systems of his campus. Over-designed, inefficient systems waste a lot of energy and money, and also make temperatures harder to calibrate and control, which leads to overheating or overcooling building residents.

One part of the solution, says Mr. Johnson, is to right-size in the first place and make sure that the amount of power drawn by the system is proportionate to actual use. A solid set of baseline data is useful here, as is getting all the engineers, operators, architects, and managers talking to each other in the beginning stages of the design process, to make sure each new building and retrofit is being designed for real, not hypothetical, use.

Another part of the solution is to get a better sense of the actual need by using technologies—such as smart metering—that allow universities to see exactly where their power is going, to stop leaks, and to turn off equipment that isn’t being used. In other words, we need to get the machines to tell us what they need and what they’re using.

Too many colleges can isolate energy usage only by building or floor, not by room or even by machine, making guesswork all too likely. The Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University is one of a host of research hubs experimenting with these metering devices, in the hopes that they might make consumers aware of their own electricity needs. Ideally, your fridge, your computer, your lights, your air conditioners, and your phone charger will all tell you how many kilowatts they’re drawing.

And the final step—getting all that information back to the utility—takes place in a process called demand response. Using this technology, energy providers have a better sense of the need, which is especially important when it comes to weather-dependent sources of power. At Stanford’s Leslie Shao-Ming Sun Field, data such as wattage arriving from the grid or being pumped back into it, propane consumption, solar-panel voltage, and the temperatures of individual solar arrays are all reported in real time. The level of detail ensures efficiency, and allows managers to fine-tune the system according to what’s actually needed. These systems also allow for small-scale, scattered generation, such as a rooftop wind turbine that sends any of its host’s unused power back into the grid.

The technology to monitor and manage both supply and demand sides is rapidly being perfected, and much of it is already well past the pilot stage. But on a large scale, we haven’t integrated the tools that will create a real conversation between energy generators and users. It’s a silence we can no longer afford. —Xarissa Holdaway

Xarissa Holdaway, one of this summer’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is campus e-news coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s campus-ecology project. You can read her other posts here.