Candlelight illumines the dining room behind us, and the sky is lit up with natural starlight, undimmed by ambient light. An impromptu orchestra of crickets and cicadas perform amidst a landscape of broken tree limbs that inundate my backyard.
I take this opportunity to ruminate out loud: Why are we still tethered to the dinosaur of a centralized electric grid, a remnant of the 20th century industrial world, when everything else had gone wireless and mobile?
For the second day in a row, thanks to Hurricane Irene, we, along with some 274,800 fellow Rhode Islanders who are National Grid customers, have no power, and no Internet. More than half of the utility’s 480,000 customers – about 96 percent of all electricity users in the state – are dancing in the dark with us. That number is down from the initial 344,000 customers reported to have lost power the day before.
Rhode Island, because of its small size with only about 1 million residents, has only about 200,000 single-family homes. How much would it cost to invest in attaching solar photovoltaic panels, solar hot water panels, and rain barrels on 100,000 single family homes in Rhode Island – at the rate of 20,000 homes a year for a five-year period? More to the point, perhaps, how does that compare the cost of damages to homes and businesses and insurance claims from the storm?
For each home, the total cost would be roughly about $15,000, or $1.5 billion in total. It could be done as a zero interest loan to the homeowner, who would pay the $15,000 back when that home is sold, creating a revolving fund. Homeowners whose property exceeds $700,000 in value would be responsible for the 50 percent of the cost.
The homeowner would reap enormous cost benefits: elimination of electricity costs at about $1,200 a year; fuel oil costs would be cut by at least 50 percent, around $1,000 a year, for the 172,000 Rhode Island households that heat their homes and hot water with oil; and water use bills would also decrease, as all outside water use would hopefully come from the rain barrels, saving about $300 a year. That’s $2,500 a year in savings per home, or $50 million across the state each year, which consumers can pump back into the economy. Payback in avoided costs would be around six years.
Even better, it would create an army of new job opportunities. Rhode Island would become a test bed for the next generation of smart energy technologies. It would create the need for hundreds if not thousands of new technicians to install the devices, as well as spark any number of new companies and innovative apps to run and control the systems.
Besides, if you look at the total cost in damages to local homes and businesses and insurance claims from Irene, it’s a much better way to invest that money, building the future, than repairing the past.
Over the next 72 hours and 1,400 miles of turnpike between Oberlin and Providence and back again, as my son and I confronted a world torn upside down by Irene, we were often guided by an iPhone. At each critical intersection in our travel, the new wireless world trumped the old infrastructure.
We discovered that Rhode Island had fared much better than our compatriots in Vermont, upstate New York, Connecticut, western Massachusetts and New Jersey.
About 60 miles of the New York State Thruway was shut down due to flooding in the aftermath of Irene, so we were forced to shunpike it through rural towns along Route 20 that, judging from the number of Victorian homes in disrepair, had last been prosperous around the same time when the Erie Canal was still a thriving conduit.
What should have taken an hour to travel became a stop-and-go scenic detour that took three hours. As a result, tired and hungry, we decided that it was worth finding some place in Rochester to eat that was healthier and more appealing than Roy Rogers at a rest stop. My son quickly used the iPhone to check out restaurants, compare menus, check the hours, and create directions – and off we went to Magnolia’s, a delightful café.
The next day, while my son drove, I conducted business for my day job, the health care reporter for weekly The Providence Business News. I was able to arrange the scheduling of a photo session for a story I was writing about a doctor and nurse who, because of electronic health records and direct interconnection with the local hospital’s emergency room, were able to coordinate seamless care for a patient who had suffered a stroke. I conducted an interview with the doctor and nurse from a highway rest stop. In addition, I was able to file my weekly online vertical, with a little help from my son’s laptop. I wrote the vertical on his computer, he e-mailed the story to me, and I was able to send it along to the editor.
If these things sound very normal and ordinary, they should. What’s not normal is that the mobility of our world has not yet translated into a similar freedom from the electric grid.
Redux: An October snowstorm left hundreds of thousands in Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts without electricity, due to downed power lines. A utility company in hard-hit Western Massachusetts blamed it on a “historic Nort’easter [that] caused pervasive damage,” as if God was the one who had created the grid. In their blanket of ads, the utility asked for continued patience, saying: “We understand the difficulties the conditions caused you and families.” I’m not sure that customers will ever truly believe the utility really feels their pain.
An old friend from high school posted on Facebook on Nov. 1: “No current events to report in my Montclair neighborhood….because there's no current. Four days (and counting) without electricity or heat. At night when I walk Leon [his dog], it's like a ghost town; dark and abandoned, with lawns and sidewalks littered with hundreds of fallen tree limbs.”
What’s blocking the adoption of a system of distributed generation – as solar panels on homes are known in the energy biz – teamed up with next generation smart technology, so we can make good choices about how we use electricity? It’s the tenacious grip that utility companies have on the grid, our lives, and our wallets. Their hold is much more difficult to remove than the fallen trees and limbs on downed power lines.
What’s the solution: It’s us. We can shiver in the dark and then commiserate together on Facebook, or we can demand that our government and our leaders invest in building a 21st century energy infrastructure.
Here’s the value proposition: The price of electricity is determined by peak demand in the summer. Rhode Island’s electric grid is managed by what’s known as ISO-New England, based in Holyoke, Mass. For every 1,000 megawatts shaved off peak demand, the region will realize about $600 million in electricity savings a year. ISO-New England expects to generate some 3,200 megawatts – about 10 percent of its peak capacity – from the demand-side management of the equation in 2014.
Rhode Island has the opportunity not only to invest in distributed generation, but also demand-side management, as the new technology tools to manage the use of electricity – smart grid apps – are overlaid upon the existing mobile, digital and wireless infrastructure. Consumers will be able to make choices – online – about time-of-day electricity usage tied to smart energy appliances. Batteries with enhanced storage capacity will augment renewable systems such as wind turbines and solar panels.
Rhode Island has the opportunity to be the innovative, cutting-edge test bed for the global energy market of renewable, distributed generation combined with next generation smart grid technology applications.
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