september 2007
EDITORIAL
There’s Got to be a Better Way by Tom Williams, Editor-in-Chief
H
ere we sit at the beginning of the 21st century burning oil and coal. Not only that, we are also tearing up the planet to find them and fighting wars to control oil, at least. Everybody knows this can’t continue, that resources will get scarcer and hence more expensive, but here we sit like some dazed drug addict refusing to acknowledge the situation. And at this point I’m just talking about generating electricity. Transportation is a whole different, albeit related, matter. The vast majority of our electricity is produced by electromagnetic induction, which as we all know, involves moving a conductor through a magnetic field causing current to flow in the conductor. The process essentially converts kinetic energy into electricity—with varying degrees of efficiency. We build enormous power plants, coal-fired, oil-fired, nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams fitted with huge generators whose mighty armatures turn to produce our power. And, with the exception of hydroelectric, how do we turn these generators? By boiling water. Yes, coal, oil and nuclear-powered plants all boil water to turn turbines that run the generators and that has consequences that we have taken for granted for generations. One of them is centralization. Large facilities being more efficient than small ones, the motivation is toward centralized power plants. The inefficiency that comes from this is the losses incurred in distribution over the grid. We’ve been doing it this way since the 20s and the grid that has evolved over that time is so rickety and vulnerable to attack that the power industry is terrified of making any major changes. Even newer sources of alternative energy like wind power tend to be concentrated where there is a good source of kinetic energy, namely wind, to turn the propellers that turn the generators. Anyone who has driven through California’s large wind farms will appreciate that they are there because that’s where the wind is. Many of the gains achieved by using wind are still offset by the inefficiency of centralized distribution. Now what does all this rehashing of our antique power grid have to do with embedded systems? A lot. For producing power, “There’s got to be a better way.” There is so far only one proven technology that produces electricity by a means other than electromagnetic induction and that is solar
power. Advances in efficiency, life expectancy and fabrication (such as solar film) are coming at a furious rate. There are roof shingle solar panels and even grid-synchronous panels that have internal inverters to connect directly to the grid. Solar panels inherently lend themselves to decentralization—but only under a new distribution model that would heavily depend on distributed computer processing and networking, technologies that are already well understood. There have been attempts in Germany to install large solar facilities that cover whole hillsides and they have led to opposition over spoiling whole areas of land. This is not only symptomatic of backward thinking; it is also unnecessary. We still need a grid. But with intelligent metering and networking, distribution can be kept much more localized than it is today with attendant reduction of transmission losses. Organizations like the Zigbee Alliance are already pioneering wireless distributed metering to eliminate sending meter readers around in trucks every month. By the same token, intelligent meters at every solar node could easily take advantage of recent developments in powerful, small form-factor boards with on-board networking, both wireless and wired Internet, to start building a modern, efficient solar-based power grid with panels on virtually every rooftop. Power bills would then reflect the power that a given node contributed to the grid versus how much was drawn off the grid in a given period. These would have to communicate with central servers for both billing and load balancing, as well as working with the existing centralized facilities on the new grid. As an added advantage, such a decentralized intelligent grid with huge numbers of distributed networked nodes would be far less vulnerable to attack and massive outages than the precarious thing we’re dealing with today. It would represent a huge opportunity for applying embedded control, monitoring and networking for participating vendors in addition to those developing and supplying the underlying solar technology. We can go on this way or we can change. And we can change by taking advantage of our technology and our initiative as a massive economic and national opportunity because, “There’s got to be a better way.” September 2007