Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: Will Vint Cerf revolutionize the smart grid in the same way he revolutionized the Information Highway?

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Monday, August 24, 2009

Will Vint Cerf revolutionize the smart grid in the same way he revolutionized the Information Highway?

[As many of you know I have long criticized today’s attempts at creating a smart electrical grid. The technologies, so far, are largely only of benefit to the utilities in avoiding building additional power plants for peak demand. The benefits to consumer and the planet are marginal at best. I am pleased to see Vint Cerf’s most recent blog where he advocates an “Internet” like approach to developing new standards for a smart grid. The evolution of the smart grid to my mind is very analogous to the development of the Internet. Before the Internet became main stream the “information highway” was largely seen as being solely the provenance of the telcos and the cablecos. To the same extent the smart grid today is seen as being part and parcel of the electrical utilities. But if we really want to create true innovation and reduce GHG emissions we need the same type of radical thinking that created the Internet which liberated us from the narrow, self serving perspective of the telcos and cablecos. Simple ideas like multiplexed power systems to eliminate vampire power loads, or dares’t I repeat myself “green broadband”, are the types of ideas we need instead of the typical megawatt-mindset solutions of the utilities . End of rant – BSA]

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/08/where-smart-grid-meets-internet.html

Where the smart grid meets the Internet
Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

The term "smart grid" means many things to many people. At the most basic level, the smart grid is defining smarter ways to deliver and use energy -- but did you know that the smart grid is also defining new ways to generate and exchange energy information?

Building information technology into the electricity grid will revolutionize the way our homes and businesses use energy. The first step will be to develop open protocols and standards to allow smart grid devices and systems to communicate with one another. That's why Google and other stakeholders are participating in a working group coordinated by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop interoperability standards for a nationwide smart grid.

When people talk about networks for exchanging information -- particularly among millions of end users -- the first thing that often comes to mind is the Internet. So it makes sense to take the successful processes used to create Internet standards and apply them to this new energy information network.

Google, for example, believes in the wisdom of crowds (we've used that wisdom to enhance our products and we continue to get feedback on future products via Google Labs and Google Code Labs). And we've found that a good way to harness the wisdom of crowds is to create open standards to solve network issues. Some of the key principles to developing truly open standards include open and free access to:
• Process. The customers of the smart grid information network are energy producers and consumers, hardware and software developers and energy regulators. Collaborate, and make sure all parties are represented during the standards discussion.
• Drafts. There are a lot of people with networking expertise who are not directly involved with smart grid; make it easy for them to participate, for example, by hosting meetings online and posting documents that are universally accessible for review.
• Comments. Allow comments resulting from current standards drafts to influence future drafts.
• Final standards. If people can't access the standard, they can't implement the standard!
• Standards unencumbered by patents. If implementers need to worry about licenses to practice the standard, it is not really a completely open standard.
The smart grid is essentially a nascent energy Internet. Thanks to the open protocols and standards on which it was built, the Internet has grown into a thriving ecosystem, delivering innovative products and services to billions of users worldwide. Applying the same principles of openness to the development of standards for our nation's electric grid would create a smarter platform for products and services, helping consumers conserve energy and save money.