Going Grid Friendly at Home
The next refrigerator you buy could help avert a blackout.
That’s the hope, at least, of Department of Energy engineers who have developed a computer chip that can sense changes in the power grid and automatically reduce how much electricity is being consumed by your water heater, dryer, air conditioner or other appliance for a few minutes or even just a few seconds.
The Grid Friendly Appliance controller, developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., already is being field-tested in hundreds of Washington state homes. Researchers believe it has the ability to save consumers $80 billion over two decades while having profound implications for the reliability of the national electricity grid. “It’s huge, potentially huge,” said Steve Hauser, executive director of the GridWise Alliance ™, a nonprofit consortium of companies focused on modernizing the country’s power grid through new technologies.
“In today’s high-tech age, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be looking at sophisticated technologies like this,” Hauser said. The Grid Friendly Appliance controller is a “smart” chip about the size of a credit card. When installed in appliances, it is able to sense if the power grid is overloading by monitoring the frequency of the electrical current. When the chip registers a drop below what the grid considers normal, it dispatches a signal. It can then shut off components of the appliance — the heating element of a dryer, for example, or the defroster on a refrigerator — until the grid stabilizes.
Innovations for controlling energy loads have been in the works for more than 15 years, from devices that set back thermostats automatically to utility-controlled appliances. The problem with those earlier models, however, was that they were clunky, expensive and centrally-managed. “Frankly, none of them have worked very well,” Hauser said. “People like you and I don’t like the idea that there’s somebody out there who can shut off our air conditioner.”
Research for a better way went into high gear after the California meltdown in 2001. The Grid Friendly Appliance controller can be installed for as little as $10 to $15 and likely would take the form of a touch-pad on the side of, say, a refrigerator that homeowners could set on “power-saving mode.”
Since the controllers would be installed only in appliances that regularly cycle on and off, consumers would likely not even notice the interruptions. But the cumulative effects of turning off millions of refrigerator compressors or dishwasher heat cycles for a few minutes, Hauser said, could keep the lights on across the country.
That, in turn, could save the U.S. economy at least $150 billion a year, which is currently the annual cost of blackouts. Blackouts usually occur at times of peak demand — about 50 to 100 hours a year, usually during a heat wave or cold spell — when a critical mass of appliances are going full blast. The Grid chip would also help consumers save because conserving electricity at the exact right moment would keep power companies from having to invest in new capacity in order to meet demand at its very highest.
