Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Could the Smart Grid Finally Do Some Good for Consumers?

September 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Americans shop for viciously for bargains, whether it’s getting plane tickets from discount web sites or driving across town to save 30 cents on a tank of gas. But when it comes to electricity, we’ve been simply writing checks for the bills we receive at the end of the month. Few of us know how much we pay for a kilowatt hour, or how many kilowatt hours we use—or what a kilowatt hour actually is. Since the 1920s, Americans have paid flat regulated prices per hour for electricity. But de-regulated wholesale electricity prices now gyrate extravagantly from nearly zero at night to as ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Electric Forecast Calls for Increasing Blackouts

July 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Lights on in only one house

It’s not just a feeling: Power outages have become normal in the United States. Last month’s heat and derecho storms that left more than 300,000 people in the Mid-Atlantic states without power (some for as long as a week) are part of a larger trend. In 2008, according to the Eaton Blackout Tracker, there were 2,169 power outages in the U.S. affecting 25 million people. In 2011, there were more than 3,000 outages affecting 41.8 million people. According to Eaton, the majority of power outages in the U.S. are caused by weather, in particular storms blowing trees on the lines, and heat ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Smart Grid Challenges Individual Privacy

June 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

If we ever get a national smart grid off the ground, as the Obama Administration envisioned this week in its newly released "Policy Framework for the 21st-Century Grid," the U.S. could address myriad policy problems with a single new set of infrastructure. With a smart grid, we could reduce energy consumption to the benefit of the environment. We could save money — and gas — on the meter readers who drive around manually recording your electricity consumption. We could better manage blackouts. We could direct energy to where it's needed most in the event of a crisis. We could even use ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Empower Your Appliances with the Smart Grid

January 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Despite strong financial support from the U.S. Department of Energy and increasing utility interest, smart grid remains a blurry concept among electricity consumers. That it could transform how we use energy and usher in an era where the term “peak load” — its nemesis — is relegated to similar obscurity. The smart grid overlays advanced information technologies on the electrical grid, allowing consumers to use energy in ways or at times that avoids drawing power at peak-load times and decreases use overall. One example is a yearlong demonstration project by the Pacific Northwest ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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