The People’s Power
On the user side, huge technological advances are now everyday: your battery-powered charged-up phone is your sound system, is your camera and your organiser. Your souped-up laptop is your worldwide research library, your portable office, your PO Box. Household appliances do better jobs on less juice. Offices are smarter – turning the lights off when nobody’s there.
On the supply side, optimisation over the years has been minimal. Coal releases energy, which volts up via a transformer, which buzzes the electricity through transmission lines, and another transformer calms the voltage again to send it wriggling along distribution lines to the consumer. The coal, poles and wires have done their job.
And like an iPhone, the DMS can include various specific optimising apps. Take the obviously named Fault Detection Isolation In A Storm app. Explains McKenzie: “It pinpoints where faults are occurring and the system then automatically calculates the best way to route power around the fault so that the minimum number of customers are offline for the minimum amount of time. That’s all done through sophisticated algorithms. Very, very different to where we were a few years ago, where people in control rooms had to make decisions about what to do.”
Calculating, self-regulating, fast decision-making software could also play a pivotal role in helping consumers to change their behaviour in a way that lowers peak demand. Says McKenzie, “If people were given a financial incentive to say, ‘Let’s have the air conditioner two degrees warmer than I’ve presently got’ … If that was all it took to avoid having to spend millions of dollars on a particular substation, people may very well take part in it.”
A surprising fact from Lucy Carter: “Air conditioners in Australia have to be capable of being remotely switched on and off. We’re not using this now, but it’s a built-in capability.”
theguardian.com