The Smart Grid: Estimating Energy and Carbon Dioxide Benefits

A smart electrical power grid could decrease electric energy use and utility sector carbon emissions up to 15 percent a year by 2030 or enough to power 70 million homes, according to a recent report from the Department of Energys Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Transcript

00:00:28 this is a study that looked at the question what role does this Margaret have in helping the nation meet its carbon management goals all together we looked at a bunch of direct and indirect mechanisms that this marker can help they add up to about at twelve percent reduction in the carbon output from our electric power grid you lay that up against a thirty percent or a twenty

00:00:53 percent carbon goal that's a very substantial contribution electric vehicles if they come about at some point may give us another five percent so an example of a direct mechanism is the the power grid loses about six or eight percent on average of the energy the electricity that is generated in the course of sending it to your home or business and we can use advanced

00:01:15 technologies especially down at the distribution level to manage voltage is very carefully and save maybe ten percent of that loss twenty percent of that loss that's like a two percent energy savings for the nation if we can do that it's a very important contribution an indirect savings mechanism is to help us manage the fluctuations in wind and solar output to

00:01:40 do that today requires power plants that you can throttle up and down that are always in reserve standby mode ready to pick up the slack if we can do that instead by using the load and storage that's located down at customer premises to do the same thing then we can eliminate the investment in those power plants and make that same investment in more renewables another important use of

00:02:10 this information in this report is to help the people that develop technologies focus their technologies on not just smart grid benefits but the carbon benefits as well the most important conclusion of the report is that the smart grid is not the the answer to our carbon problem but it has a very important contribution to make in helping us solve that

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