[MUSIC] Today's topic is the electric grid. And you might recall if we take a map of the United States here, right, that we have Michigan, right, that we have the West. We've got Texas, and we have the rest of the country. This goes on up into Canada, too, okay. But why can't we have these grids connected? Well, I told you last time, they're out of phase and their controls don't meet. But that's not a good thing to have. We'd like to be able to overcome this and actually be able to go to a system called the smart grid. This is not going to happen overnight. In fact, this is already happening today, a variety of schemes, government investment, private incentification, to try to get our grid into one that will have fewer difficulties and fewer problems. This is the world at night. I love looking at a graphic like this because it really shows the differences between the developed and undeveloped world. If you can pick out South Korea, there, next to Japan, and you notice that it looks like it's an island. That's because it's North Korea right above that that has no lights because they have very low energy use. You see Western Europe lit up like a candle. You can see America lit up like a candle. You can look down on the Caribbean. And, of course, the island that's part of America, Puerto Rico, is one solid beacon of light. The Rocky Mountains make some interruptions, but it's a great graphic example. Now, let's zoom in on the United States. There we go. You can pick out the lines of the interstate highways even. So here we were, humming along on some night in 2003. And then the world saw, and the US saw, just how vulnerable our grid was. It probably started with a squirrel in one substation interrupting the power. So can one squirrel take down a whole part of the country? Well, if everything was lined up just right, yes. But when that squirrel got in the substation, and because the routing of power was not done by computer, it was not a smart grid, it was a human grid, and people had to turn the right switches, and do the right thing, and route the power to the right way, and it didn't quite work, what happened was this. Look at that, there is this big gap in the United States from Ohio up through Toronto out to the coast. One giant bite taken out of North America, in the dark, because of the largest power outage in recent memory taking down the home businesses, factories, street lights for tens of millions of people. And we'd like to prevent that, we'd like to be able to have a grid that can adjust. One that's computer monitored, that can sense disruptions going by. You're not going to get rid of squirrels, you're going to have outages. You're going to have poles fall down, you're going to have thunderstorms, right. But you don't want to take out massive parts of the country. So to prevent that, we will have the smart grid, and the smart grid will do several things. You can see here that one of the big reasons for it, right here, is to connect all types of sources of power. It's much easier to connect large power plants at one location. Distributed wind farms take some more effort, but they're worth it, especially since they are making over 4% of our electricity. You also want to have this lead feature right here, self-healing. You want the grid to be able to adjust its power flow all by itself and be able to get that done. This requires, >> Infrastructure and monitors. I can pull out my cellphone right now. And by opening up a particular app, I can actually monitor and see how much electricity my house is using. I can actually turn the thermostat off. I don't want to do that. I think it's kind of cool. I don't it's that big of a deal to be able to control it. But the cool thing is that it's not just me the that gets this data, the power company gets the data. And if the power company gets the data, that's being smart. That means they can know when my electric use is peaking or when the whole region's is peaking or when some small part of the region goes out because a substation blows up. Right, and it won't have to take down the entire state because they can shuttle power appropriately, automatically, by computer instead of by people looking at dials and switches or getting calls up and being told that, hey, my power's out. In fact, the last time I did have a power outage at my house and I called up, they already knew. That's smart. This is another vision of the smart grid, to connect the West and Texas and the east. And the way to connect them, because remember they were out of phase, right. One might have its ups and downs of its sine wave like this, the other one might have the ups and downs like this. You can't add this and this and get any decent type of power. What you would need to do is to go from the AC to the DC. And then, of course, you can go back to AC. So those green lines connecting those grids would be a way to take one power grid, convert it to direct current instead of alternating current, and then convert back to the alternating current so everything in that grid can be on its same phase that it always has been. Another good thing about this is that if you can do high voltage DC, you have the fewest transmission losses. In fact, as higher the voltage you get, the fewer loss you have. One reason it's always been difficult to connect across the Rocky Mountains, to shuttle power that far, is that you start losing a lot of percentage every mile that you go. And that energy is just lost, it's radiated. So the smart grid, interconnections, available ease to connect other electric sources, computer control, computer monitoring, moving flows easily. And, finally, interconnecting all of our grids with high voltage, high capacity lines that can transmit with fewer losses, that's the future. That's the smart grid, and that's what you need to know. [MUSIC]
