Environmental Benefits of the Smart Grid: Smart Grid Technology Articles: Eco20/20

Environmental Benefits of the Smart Grid

Smart Grid technologies will offer many environmental benefits compared with our current, out-of-date, national power grid. Some of the benefits are obvious, but others are a bit more subtle.

The United States, while having only about 5% of the world's population, uses about a quarter of the world's energy resources and produces a comparable amount of greenhouse gas emissions. It is easy to see that this is simply not fair, and it is also not sustainable. The Smart Grid will help us reduce our burden on our neighbors, and also the planet. Research and design on the Smart Grid system has been done by scientists, power companies, and other computer service industries to help provide a solution that will tackle both the need for a more up-to-date, reliable grid, and the need for a grid that reduces our impact on the environment.

Using more intelligent, digital electricity management strategies, use of Smart Grid technologies will improve the energy efficiency of power plants. This load-management strategy will reduce peak hour demand for energy, putting less strain, and requiring less maintenance on currently overloaded plants.

Being more efficient in energy usage could also reduce the need for, and thus demand for new power plants and transmission lines. Effective load-management of the current energy infrastructure would mean that fewer plants would have to build the peak-hour management infrastructure that is needed to help avoid blackouts during the most power-hungry times of day.

The Smart Grid makes the prospect of large-scale renewable energy generation a much more viable option due to the ability to manage and integrate distribution of energy across the nation. The technical integration of the energy grid will allow wind and solar farms to connect with the national grid to help offset electricity deficits during peak hours. The more that we can turn to renewable energy sources to replace our older, more out-of-date power stations, the more we, as a nation, can reduce our impact on the planet.

The ability to manage and increase efficiency of energy usage will lead to an overall decrease in demand for electricity which, not only by itself reduces our impact on the environment, but it also means that clean energy - a source that doesn't have a whole lot of viability for super high levels of production at the current moment - will have a market where they can not only compete, but provide vital additional electricity generation during the most demanding times.

Introducing Smart Grid technologies does not only apply to power generation stations and transmission lines, it will also require the production of more "intelligent" appliances. These appliances will be integrated into the two-way communication network, and thus be able to sense when energy usage is at its peak, and thus reduce their power consumption or shut off completely. This integration will allow for power grid overload issues to be avoided before they even happen.

Management of peak hour energy usage is also a way to manage and reduce air pollution. The EPA has shown that the highest levels of particulate air pollution correspond to the highest peak hours of energy usage (burning all that coal and natural gas will do that!). The ability to control the grid during these times will allow us to use energy from a variety of sources without overloading and taxing the grid, and also provide energy producers the ability to decrease generation capacity during these times to reduce overload and also the levels of particulate matter in the air at peak hours.

These are just of the few benefits that introducing a Smart Grid electrical system will provide our nation - and the world. As more research is done, and more of these technologies begin to be put into place, we are likely to find out that there are an even greater number of benefits to our new strategy than we originally thought possible!