- You know, the advanced energy economy sector
is one of the biggest market opportunities of our era.
And Eau Claire gets it, and Madison gets it,
and now the rest of Wisconsin needs to get it.
They need to participate in this advanced energy
economy market that is growing every day.
I've had the privilege of working with a group of
researchers from the University of California Berkeley along
with the Wisconsin Energy Institute, my former employer,
on something called the Wisconsin jobs project.
And in that report we identified over 200 companies,
in fact 209 in Wisconsin, who already work in the sensors
and controls supply chain in our state.
Some of these are big companies like Johnson Controls
or Rockwell Automation, and some are startups
and some are in the supply chain.
And we don't have to spend billions of dollars
to recruit these companies, they are here,
they're producing sensors and controls,
and sensors and controls are really the centerpiece,
I think, to the advanced energy economy.
But they're also the centerpiece to the bathroom,
if you walk into the men's bathroom right now and
rub your hand in front of the towel thing,
the towel should come out although we
noticed earlier they weren't coming out,
so maybe that sensor wasn't working.
But with a favorable policy environment,
our study found that we could be creating over
44 thousand jobs annually through 2030 in manufacturing,
software development and supply chain jobs.
But we had 13 policy recommendations that
we thought needed to be put in place.
Now you can find that report, it's free online, just
Google Wisconsin job project or American jobs project
and there's actually over 13 states who've done those.
The slide in front of you is the epitome of solar technology
innovation, and really energy technology innovation.
In front of you, you see over 35 years
of research on solar panels.
An amazing thing where the private sector, federal labs,
and the state
along with individual researchers kept working
and working and working to make the solar module better.
What do you think happened over this period of time?
99% price decrease in solar panels which allowed the market
that everybody's been talking about here to happen.
It's really been a paradigm shift.
The first major paradigm shift really in the energy sector.
And I think that paradigm shift is really gonna
continue, and we're about to look at
a complete change in our energy system.
A complete change in really how we manage supply and demand
through new technologies and through behavior.
And so I say we need to start first, as this slide
indicates, by looking at where's the waste in that system.
I also believe that we need to do energy planning.
And Wisconsin sadly is only one of 10 states
that doesn't do energy planning.
And it's time to do it here in our state.
Because with all of these new technologies and all of these
new opportunities, you really aren't going to get
to 100% renewables as these cities and others
are charging forward to do without a plan.
So I would really recommend that even we start modestly
with something called energy distribution planning,
and we can talk about that later if you like.
These technologies are kind of captured on this one slide,
and I've tried to simplify this technical geeky term
called distributed energy resources, DERs,
I hate the term.
So I say, it's buy it, make it, eliminate it, store it,
shift it, careful when you say that publicly,
manage it, share it, and reduce it.
And I believe if you chant these eight words every morning
that we will have an advanced energy economy.
So practice with this slide.
But you'll see behind of these,
every one of these terms, is a technology.
Micro-grids, energy storage, which my colleague Bruce is
gonna elaborate on, demand response or what I like to call
demand flexibility, and this concept of share it.
I'll get back to that quickly.
Grid modernization really is the key to all of this,
and grid modernization in very simple terms is
two-way electron flow, two way communication.
Again, sadly Wisconsin I think is ranked 39th,
I don't know what they're ranked in this study,
but there's a study that just came out that said we're 39th.
So we got a lot of work to do, but we can get there.
Every week a new report comes out about how these new
technologies, these DER technologies-- you will learn
that term, DER technologies-- can save us money.
And I love our utilities, I mean, I think they're
really important as part of our solution.
But I think under the existing utility business model,
it's gonna be really hard for prices to come down.
I think really only with technology innovation can the price
come down, and that's why I'm excited about DER technology
today, and what exists today, but certainly
more importantly what exists in the future.
So this was a study on Indiana, how they could save
2.3 billion with DER technology.
We can go into much deeper depth on that some other time,
'cause we have just a limited time today,
but I want you to be aware of these studies,
and I can provide you links if you wanna contact me.
The other emerging area is solar storage.
I think this is sort of what, some people call it
the Swiss army knife in the DER technology.
With storage, I think we're gonna eventually get
to the point where we have dispatch-able renewables.
We're not there yet, but I think we can get there.
And again, I think storage in combination with demand
response and other DER technologies will allow us
to really change how we manage supply demand.
Now this is a depiction of something that I had the
privilege of working with my colleague Bruce,
along with Professor Tom Johnson, Professor Bob Lassiter,
on the concept of clustered micro-grids.
And Bruce is gonna elaborate on this,
we did work together to plan some of this.
But basically, when you see on top there the depiction
of our legacy system, there's tremendous energy
system losses every time we make energy.
So we need to find ways, again, my first slide,
how do we improve on getting rid of energy system losses?
Well I think with clustered micro-grids, which are closer
to the load, closer to where energy is needed,
generation closer to the load, we can start to reduce
those inefficiencies and really help us move along to
100% renewable before we even hang up a single solar panel.
Just by how we organize the energy system.
And so I challenge us out there to think about this.
We haven't 100% nailed it, but I think we're close.
I also think there's a new generation of demand management,
I call it demand flexibility, and again,
this could save customers money today,
with today's technology, and it keeps getting better.
So I'm bullish on this, if you can't tell.
And sure enough, another study looked at Texas
and how demand flexibility could save them money.
And so I highly recommend there is a link to it,
hopefully you can download these slides
or find them on the academy website, yes?
And take a closer look at that.
And now here's something that I spent the last two years of
my life working on which is called transactive energy.
It was a project from the US Department of Commerce
which had I think over a hundred people who volunteered
their time to work on, what would an
energy market of the future look like?
What would an energy market look like if
everybody in this room participated in it?
And to be honest, it took us two years
to even agree on what it would look like.
We did issue three reports, and they're available
at the Wisconsin Energy Institute website.
But there's this term "blockchain," which is really
an electronic ledger that's kind of linked to
transactive energy, but I like to remind people that
the two don't have to necessarily be together.
'Cause there's some problems with blockchain
that I think technology still needs to solve.
But nonetheless, this would be a peer-to-peer energy market
where you could sell or trade electrons, or share electrons.
I like this concept of electron sharing.
Some people call it the electrons common.
I know it's a little socialist, apologize for that,
but I think it's an interesting concept,
and I think we have to explore
the transactive energy market opportunity in this country
and really empower people to be a partner with their utility
and being a solution to I think what may be the
biggest environmental challenge we've ever faced.
So it's gonna take new rules, it's gonna take new thinking.
I love this phrase, artisanal, locally raised electrons.
It's kind of a joke, you know, but it's a nice concept,
and a nice site who mentioned it
at least on a podcast that I heard.
Other people talk about the Uber of energy.
I don't like that one, myself, but I'll explain that privately.
But this is not just a bunch of goofy academics in theory.
These markets are already starting
to develop all over the world.
And I mentioned here Sonnebatterie in Germany,
a company in the Netherlands, etc.
The one that people here in the United States are certainly
noticing are the Brooklyn micro-grid project.
But the one that isn't on this slide that
really caught my attention is Texas.
Texas, you know, that liberal bastion of liberal policy.
No actually it's one of the most conservative states
and it's a free-market versus a regulated utility market.
And, a number of the companies down there in their renewable
energy market have just merged with blockchain companies.
And I'm like, oh my gosh, Texas.
And that crazy socialist idea I was
just talking about of shared electrons.
So we'll see where that goes, not gonna guarantee
or promise anything, but what I really think this
means is we're just in exciting times.
The technology available is really in many ways liberating
the energy system, I think in ways
we haven't completely grasped yet.
It's a new supply demand energy paradigm that we need to
wrestle with and figure out how to manage it better.
'Cause at the end of the day the technology only gets us so far.
The most important component in this is us,
and I think we can do it.
But I think we need to achieve something like deep
de-carbonization, some policies that are innovation-centric.
We need policies that measure environmental performance
from our utilities and our providers,
and we need enhanced customer choice in this system,
including some sharing of data.
And I think those are major policy challenges that
I'm committed to working on, and I hope you are too.
But now I wanna turn it over to our other panelists who are
gonna kinda fill in the gaps of kinda what I just quickly
told you about, and really talk about what's going on
both in the academic research and the marketplace,
Josh and Bruce, here.
(applause)
- Hello everyone, I'm Josh Arnold,
it's a great pleasure to be here.
I am with Navigant, Navigant is a multi-national management
consulting firm, we work with utilities and
government agencies all over the world.
I'm based in Madison and currently working with Manus and
Sustainable Engineering Group, advising the city of Madison
on how to get to its goal of 100%
renewable energy and zero net carbon.
Today I'm here to talk with you a little bit about
what's happening in the private sector as far as some of the
different things that we're seeing in the marketplace.
One of the fun things about working for a big company is
we have offices all over the world, and I'll be sharing
some examples of local efforts from around the world
that are local to some of our different offices and that I
think have some fun takeaways for right here in Wisconsin.
A lot of what I'll be sharing is from a recent report
that we just published called
"Navigating the Urban Energy Transformation'"
I have a few copies with me that are
at the front table, otherwise there's a link at
the end of the presentation for how you can
download an electronic copy of this.
And hopefully it has lots of useful information for you.
So earlier, Gary was talking about this wonderful
description and, could we call it a mantra, really,
for some of this? - Sure, we can.
- So the way that we kind of think of it at Navigant is
how the energy transformation is happening, and what I'm
gonna invite you all to do is sorta be thinking about
Gary's mantra as I talk with you about the energy cloud,
because I think those two things are really just
two different ways of explaining the same thing, which is
that the energy industry and the energy grid is changing.
What we used to have is these one way power systems that
were horribly inefficient, we lose so much energy from the
time that it's produced at the source
to the time that it reaches its end use.
And what we're finding is we have sort of this
terrific combination of technology advancements
along with economic forces and new business models,
and the people are a really big piece of all of this.
And really what we're finding is that the traditional
energy path of distributing energy and the business model
for the energy cloud is something that utilities
all over the world are racing to figure out
for each of their local communities.
And this I think is going to be one of the key things
that really drives the new business model for utilities,
and we're finding that's the case all over
North America and all over the world.
So the energy cloud has a few different components,
and you can see them up there, and there's a
much greater description in our whitepaper as well.
And as part of that, and as part of what municipalities
and cities might be thinking about when you go to explore
energy cloud concepts, or tomorrow's energy grid.
There's all sorts of co-benefits that come along with
some of these technology advances, right?
So it's not just about energy, it's about creating jobs,
it's about having safer places, it's about workforce
retention and attracting and keeping the best people.
All of those things we can accomplish
together using the same strategies.
And that's what's so fun about working in this space
right now is that it opens up so much opportunity for
collaboration, for creativity, and for public private
partnerships and other ways to really advance the agenda.
So I'm gonna share I think five examples of our work
in various places around the world, some fun things that
are happening, and then wrap it up with a couple of
quick anecdotes about some of our work in Madison.
So first I'd like to share a little bit about
some of the work that we're doing in the Netherlands.
We have, our main office in Europe is based in Utrecht.
To me, Utrecht's sort of almost like
the Madison of the Netherlands in some ways.
It's a college town and a great place.
So our group there has been working with the municipality
there to help them chart out a path to zero net energy.
And one of the key things that we did there is we worked
with a group of citizens who came in voluntarily
on three Saturdays to do all sorts of planning.
And there was actually so much interest there that we had to
do a lottery in order to find the people who would come.
So there were so many people who wanted to come
we had to only accept enough people
and we had to do that through a lottery.
So that citizen engagement was such a key part of
finding a broad range of people who would be willing
to invest in this outcome and support the outcome.
So one of the things that we've seen is strong leadership
is one of the keys to making these initiatives happen.
And then in Hamburg, Germany, we have another office,
and there we're doing some really fun GIS modeling
on some of the infrastructure that Hamburg has available
to support district energy and all sorts of really cool
opportunities for adding on renewables
and other goals to get to zero net carbon.
So the key takeaway from our office there
and from some of the work that we're doing there
is having this network of partnerships.
So it might be the local utility, it might be the
local government, might be private sector groups,
all these groups working together for aims that overlap.
And in Rotterdam we are supporting some work from
Jeremy Rifkin and some of the work that his group is doing.
Rotterdam is one of the largest ports in the world,
I think up until recently it was the largest
and now there's some others in Asia that are larger.
But really interesting opportunities there
with Rotterdam.
And a large group of municipalities, so 23 different
municipalities there, and part of the initiative there is
figuring out not only the technology piece of it,
but again, the people piece of it.
How does everyone work together to accomplish mutual goals.
So really, really exciting things there that are going on.
And then some of our work out of our London office is with
the municipality a little bit outside of London,
Milton Keynes, where they are working on some AV testing.
And we're doing actually some terrific work in
Madison as well on autonomous vehicles, AV.
One of the things that Gary was talking about earlier was
about using data, and the opportunities for big data and how
data can help inform some of these different strategies.
And some of the cool things that are happening in the UK
are the same types of things that are happening in Madison
and in other places, where you have city traffic groups
or the university testing out some really terrific
opportunities to harness data and then use it to
manage traffic, to manage mobility, and all sorts of
really interesting opportunities.
So another fun case study from the UK,
and then of course
some of the work that we're doing in Madison.
With Madison it's been a terrific project that we've been
working on with Sustainable Engineering Group,
and very much a microcosm of what I think different
communities around the world are thinking about.
We have a diverse group of stakeholders that all wanna
reach the same goal, but there's lots of different ways
of how we could get there, and it's a matter of figuring out
what's technologically feasible, but then also what is
operationally feasible for the city, and of course
what's politically and economically feasible as well.
So balancing all those aspects together
is part of what we're doing now.
And as Manus shared a little bit earlier,
we're on our way to providing some options for the city.
And the idea here is not only will Madison be
looking at its own city operations, but it will also
provide leadership for the rest of the community,
thank you, for the rest of the community as far as
how to achieve zero net carbon and renewable energy goals.
And here's a little bit of information about some of that
smart city information, so Madison is part of the smart
cities collaborative, a group of 16 cities sponsored by
Google sidewalk labs, and sharing ideas about smart cities
and all sorts of really cool stuff.
So I mentioned the energy cloud earlier, and hopefully some
of you may have been thinking this mantra as I was talking,
and I'll leave you with one of the outcomes of our
Madison project is we developed the Madison energy cloud.
And this was input from public stakeholders so
at one of our public meetings we had an illustrator
who was doing a live drawing as people were talking about
different ideas that they contributed for
what they see as Madison's energy cloud.
So this collection of graphics here is an outcome
of the public process that we've used for Madison,
and it just shows the wide diversity of ideas
and also the opportunities that are available
both for Madison and for all of us to explore these
incredible economic opportunities, and also the
incredible opportunities to reduce carbon.
So thank you all very much, I appreciate it, and
if anyone would like to download the paper,
there's a link on the website there and we can
pass around a link later with that information.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Well my name is Bruce Beihoff.
I'm from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and
I'm one of Gary's colleagues both in his new role,
as well as when we worked together
at the Wisconsin Energy Institute.
And I'm gonna take you, if I do my job correctly,
I'm gonna take you on a journey
that most of you have not been on.
Did you know that if I show you a slide for
8/10ths of a second, your mind can record it?
I'm about to prove that during this presentation,
and if I've done my job right, some of these slides
you will not really see, but you will wake up hopefully
this evening and you will be seeing them on your eyelids.
And hopefully this doesn't turn into a terrorizing
nightmare by the time I'm done.
But the approach here is to teach you about, and not to
explain something to you, that is really just a hidden
backdrop of everything you've probably talked about
the entire meeting, which is all the pieces
and parts end up as a big system.
And I'm gonna try to take you on a journey to explain
the opportunity we have right now, by understanding
the energy systems in this way, to more rapidly
get all of the technological changes we would like
and to invent types of technologies we wouldn't have
invented before because we can understand the energy system
this way, so that's the little story,
there's a whole bunch of famous professors here.
You can see, I'm not supposed to turn around,
I do it all the time.
Mike Corradini who was a very famous professor in
engineering physics, Tom Johnson, you heard Gary,
very famous professor in COE, College of Engineering
for those of you who aren't UW grads.
And the professor emeritus Bob Lassiter who many people call
the inventor of the micro-grid, the first person to ever
run a micro-grid on this planet.
And I'm just Bruce Beihoff and I'm a technical director
at Grainger Institute, I am a UW alum but
right now you'll understand what I do at the
Institute after you see this presentation.
So we're gonna talk a little bit about energy systems,
'cause that's what we're supposed to be talking about,
and a bit about architecture, which everybody
generally uses in their daily conversation,
but the really special definition
of it that's required here.
The architecture of energy systems, and seeing
and changing our mindset from grids to networks.
You've heard a lot about when people talk about
bi-directional energy flow and more distributed.
Those are terms that come from network engineering,
and many times we don't think of the grid as a network,
we just think of it as some kind of a matrix that's
sitting, built in stone around us and it just
is unchanging, but it's very changing.
Examples of trends enabling architectural evolution,
and challenges and opportunities and what's to come.
And I'm gonna jump over some of these
or we'll never get through this.
First, integrated energy systems.
This is a slide Gary and I drew about five years ago,
and we were sitting at a coffee shop.
And I had just decided I had failed at retirement
and that's how I ended up back at the university.
I retired from 40 years of corporate life
and then got tricked back into the university
and I've been there ever since.
But essentially what we drew was, these are the five major
components that run around and chase each other's tail.
If you see them, you've heard things about them all day.
There's only one that's gonna be surprising.
Loads, storage, sources, big networks in the middle
that transmit and distribute power between everything.
Fundamental policy and economy, you guys have
talked about that already, and fundamental systems.
Because in the end, really we use fundamental
systems engineering to connect everything.
And it's kind of invisible to most people no matter
where they work in the grid that that's what we do.
But where did this all start?
It started with power systems, and this is what we would've
typically, now this is some engineering eye candy
that we use, but it's pretty important.
And I showed-- these are all things that I'm an alum of
at UW, there could be many things.
WEMPEC and PSERC are two powerful research entities in the grid,
but it all starts with just kind of engineering.
And it started with the typical grid you see in the middle,
this is the one that most of us have seen before,
it's a big grid schematic, it shows buses and feeders
and cross-feeders and sub-feeders.
But it's where it all started, and then
we really began to study it as a system
and we got good at modeling just everything.
Out from that branched out, we model generators like on the
right, and we model these solid state converters that take
DC and turn them into AC, and we began to be able to
basically mathematize everything on that grid.
But the concept of power and energy
of the system started with this.
In order to handle that, the university had to change.
And the university basically did things
like this, every university did.
But you should know our university did it as well.
And it gathered up all these different people
and you'll notice it stretched way beyond the grid.
It got into bio-energy, it got into chemistry,
it got into material sciences, it got into
the understanding of networks.
The Morgridge institute has a very powerful globally
recognized that just looks at network theory.
It looks at all kinds of networks including the grid.
And the solar lab.
So we had to gather in all the universities to deal with
these big power energy systems
and had to gather people together.
The key thing that they found when they gathered people
together is there's this principle of architecture.
Now we all think of architecture, we go out and say that's
a nice looking building, must've had a good architect.
Well I'm gonna explain where the term came from and why
in trying to integrate all these great technologies,
we have to start seeing the grid as something that
needs to be architected, just like a good set of buildings.
So first it's, I've got some technical
stuff here, but don't worry about it.
A logical description of present and future interactions
between structure and function, a logical description of
interactions between structure and function to meet
present and future objectives, and finally,
a set of principles that enables the interaction
between structure and function to meet present objective.
Now that was actually an evolution
of what architecture came to mean.
And if I translate it, it meant initially architecture
was one view one point in time, a building looked like
a building and it stayed that way no matter what.
Then the second view was it had to meet present and future
objectives, so then the building, you had to have a wall
at the edge of the building you could knock out
to add another piece to a building.
And finally, it got into interactions, architecture had to
be redefined again, said when people are in the building
they have to be able to see each other, call each other,
interact with each other because the building was for the people,
not just for the sake of the building.
So then interactions had to be introduced.
And I show you a little Sudoku chart at the bottom here.
You've all played Sudoku,
well architecture's a lot like Sudoku.
You've got structures on one side and functions,
you've got some physical things like tables,
and the tables have to hold you up.
Function, you gotta be able to put something
on a table and not fall off.
What's the structure, it's a table,
it's got four legs and it stands.
And so the whole world, when we put together complex,
this is based on this simple little Sudoku idea of
combining those and figuring out what connects to what.
So why is there an architectural approach?
Well, it's over seven thousand years old,
and so it's even older than I am,
as the graduate students would say.
And the growing complexity of systems forced us to do it.
As systems got bigger and more complex,
we had to take an, we had to look at--
Where should functions exist, should they exist
on the table or in the light?
Should the table be lit or should there be a light above us.
So we had to ask that question and as it got more and more
complicated, you'll see as I show the next drawing,
we had to use this approach to be able to take and make
systems work, they didn't work unless we thought this way.
So this is kind of an interesting chart.
It just shows how long we've been doing systems.
The pyramid was a huge system five thousand years ago.
And these numbers are real, I once had to defend these
at a famous mathematics conference, they're real.
There's a million blocks in the pyramid, but if you look
at the number of functions, there's like four functions.
Grab the pharaoh's body, keep his belongings, two functions.
Keep the body there, keep the belongings, keep bad guys out.
So even though it's got a million parts,
it's only got four functions.
And then as we built great cathedrals, we built man of war,
we built the rail network, the rail network is one of the
first times the word network was used.
Then we built the telephone network, and by the way,
these are all full resolution, so when you get these,
zoom in, 'cause they're real, you can see
what an old phone system looked like.
Then we did things like space shuttle, and we compressed
all the complexity of a phone network into something that
weighed 20 tons and was gonna move
at 20 thousand miles an hour.
And then finally I've got the big ball of the Internet, the
big rats nest of the Internet, I shouldn't call it that but.
And every time we did this, the number of parts, pieces,
complexity functions went up, now they're exponentially
built, they're 10 to the 18th.
Not 10 to the 6th anymore number of functions.
Our grid is considered the biggest one of these networks.
It's not really, but electrical engineers
is always over-claiming stuff.
So architecture in the grid.
This is the famous thing that started
every picture you've seen today off.
This was the first smart grid representation in this corner.
This is almost 10 years old now.
So all these other diagrams you saw of bi-directional power
and everybody loves everybody and everyone is kinda hugging,
they're holding hands electrically and that all started
from this picture originally published by a combination of
NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
and a bunch of groups back in like 2008.
What did we have to do to make any of that real?
First a bunch of us crazy guys who were into grids and
networks had to play Sudoku, and we basically had to
figure out, okay, where would you connect all that stuff,
why wouldn't a generator just be a generator
and not have any other function?
Why wouldn't a generator be centralized?
Maybe I want some generation to be in one structure,
maybe structure S1 or S2, and one generator, so why not?
We had to do that, and nobody gave us any credit for it
and nobody gave us any awards, but we went off and did this
because no matter what we're gonna do this stuff.
Now this you won't see, you actually are seeing it, but
you'll dream about it as nightmare later tonight.
Then we really got into making the grid you normally see
and there's all different kinds of diagrams and models we do
to create a real dynamic, everything from distribution
to generation, dispatch diagrams, and everything.
Well, it gets a little worse before it gets better.
Because next we have to actually layer, because then we
found out that at these different layers in the network,
we actually had electrical grid, we had a water grid,
we had a sewer grid, oh, yeah.
Especially when you talk about all this urbanization stuff,
you gotta get through all of this
in order to do really a good job.
Then you have to layer the grid out,
then you have to look at domain relationships.
Remember, it's all gotta talk together.
So then you determine, is DNP3 going to work,
can you really use Ethernet IP SEC 1 or SIL 2.
So you have to create all these domain interaction
relationships, and here's the best part that engineers
never talk about, this is the secret is
we have to put standards together or nothing we do,
none of the panels, none of the distributed
generation connects to anything.
So that's what we really had to do.
Now it got a little worse than that, not much worse, but.
Then we began to talk about these national problems.
We said, oh, there's an electrical grid.
Or the fuel grid.
Most people don't talk about it, talk to a university
sometimes, we study this stuff all the time.
There's a water grid, there's an atmosphere grid,
there's an economic grid, oh yeah.
And so these things are now, because we're so complicated,
we're so big, we have so many points of contact,
now everything talks and that's what I basically say.
How could we ever hope to do this job?
Now we get into what we could do here.
It turns out you don't have to be that big.
You can do this locally, this is a little local job.
This is Sacramento.
Not because, I'd rather do this here in Wisconsin,
but Sacramento paid people to do it.
(laughter)
And basically it takes apart a district in Sacramento.
It starts out with just a map like Josh showed you.
We have to create a whole bunch of fancy network stuff,
then we break it apart into layers, then we actually
run both a technical assessment of dynamics and economics,
we do an LCA over here which is really some fancy Excel
spreadsheets, we find out that we're wrong about something,
we go back and we change the network.
So it's pretty easy to understand.
It's a little bit like me trying to learn knitting,
but this I learned, knitting I didn't, anyway.
So where did this take us? This took us basically
to the concept of these distributed systems.
And I have one version here, what's really happening?
I show it's got micro-grids, smart feeders,
distributed resources, everything you've heard about.
But when I blow this up a bit
you'll see it's a pretty simple idea.
We took big top-down grids and we began to create grids
that are both radial, so they only have one power flow,
and rings, where they have two possible power flows.
And then we create sub-grids, and those sub-grids
have tended to be called micro-grids.
Now the original founder of the micro-grid said,
unless this little block here could disconnect itself
in a few electrical cycles, and seamlessly could
disconnect and connect again, it wasn't a micro-grid.
We redefined it as years went on to say
anything when we break the grid down into pieces
that has some level of autonomy under certain conditions,
which is different than the original definition.
And that's what most people call micro-grids today.
But what Bob Lassiter did, he did one better, he said,
well the hell with calling it a micro-grid,
we'll call it a dynamic distribution system.
So take that, you guys who don't
understand why I define a micro-grid that way.
The market view pretty well, you saw already,
you can see that what's happened is this top down
has shifted to some bilateralism.
You can see that instead of having everything as always
vertically from generation down to the end customer,
there's this middle ground that's been created between
the end customer and services and utility and services.
Pretty simple diagram.
And we've created a middle ground where people are able to
add other value add, now I'm not gonna re-debate
with all the other previous speakers,
because they've already said that.
What are some trends that make this so imperative?
And I'm just gonna hit you one right after the other,
get ready for the 0.8 second stuff.
If you look at the power wall trends then look at the
bottom number, the fact that, and by the way this is
the raised price, it used to be 353 and they--
If I even got the prices-- Tesla just raised the power wall
average price up by I think 50 dollars.
But look at that, 393 kilowatts per hour,
another one 923 another 1488, a huge spread.
This is one of the problems, by the way.
These have different specs, they're not all exactly
the same spec, some have much higher discharge rates,
and I could wax poetic about it, but the point is
these are roughly three to four times less
than what they would have been 10 years ago.
3x to 4x, every one of these, depending on spec.
So it's just an example of some of the things
that allow you to integrate it, yet integrating needs
can be a real architectural problem
depending on where you are in the grid.
Here's another one, I've got so many statistics,
let's pop by a few of these.
This is, you can see that I've done a lot of cost summaries.
These are all real, these all have corrected figures
you can't get anywhere else, that's because I don't mind
telling you all kinds of stuff our grad students are doing
because I just don't care, so I don't care if you read,
if I haven't published this yet then
you guys should be able to read this stuff and know about
and there's more important things I need to work on
with publication anyway so I'm not gonna worry about
trying to say our students have calculated one more number.
So in any case, I'm gonna try to get out of here faster
by jumping over some of the statistics.
Lots of cost reduction statistics, lots of them.
I've gone to an EPRI study, I've actually re-benchmarked
a few points that are even lower,
and I give references where those point are.
I also recalculated one of the only publicly distributable
Lazar charts, I've actually looked at some new averages
and means that have come up, I explain why batteries
are decreasing, you won't find this anyplace else.
We could've spent all, just this slide,
'cause people say that can't be right,
why are batteries, why do solar cells decrease?
Well it's what's called doing a fundamental multi-physics
analysis, which we've done on batteries and we can explain
what's volatile and what's decreasing.
Trends and generating costs, same thing,
generating costs coming down.
I've got another study that shows that those costs aren't
wrong, it's a totally separate study from different data
that shows the generating cost.
So distributed generation has come down
over the last few years of roughly 40%
compared to what it was five, six years ago.
And something you won't see either, the cost of a PMU.
By the way, in case you're not a utility person,
that's phase or measurement unit, that's what allows you
to really measure power anywhere in the grid.
And you can see the costs were pretty high at one time,
a hundred thousand dollars to put in a PMU,
there's a lot of reasons why it cost that much.
The equipment might have cost 30 or 40,
but it cost a lot to integrate.
And I've got a ton of stuff here about what are the
interaction problems but I think I'm gonna just, what I
promised you you will remember every one of these slides.
'Cause I'm giving you plenty of time
for this to embed itself on your brain.
So I'm gonna get to the last slide, see I promised.
So then where does all that fancy engineering tomfoolery
and techno-economic analysis get us.
Well, it turns out that initially came a smart grid view
of this, so this wasn't totally me or any--
Smart grid started out, and then another group came in.
You've heard of EPRI.
EPRI did the integrated grid.
And then this made a comeback,
remember Gary showed you the transactive energy,
this came out of the transactive energy framework.
And then NIST decided to take the high ground
from all these fancy technical organizations
that tried to harness the power of
cats running all over the place.
And along came grid-wise architecture,
that's the first time we ever, as a country,
actually had a group get together to do architecture.
And that was a combination of NIST
and all of the national labs.
So what it did is it connected everything you've heard about.
What are the big questions about big data,
and I've given you the one big question
our grad students have come up with.
Industrial systems, we talk about
grids as they're just homes.
Our industrial systems and our heavy
commercial system, economics and policy.
These all are questions from our grad students,
so these are people much younger and brighter than I am.
And commercial and residential.
So they've asked the questions,
and utilities and third parties, oh, that too.
So really, we've got integrated grid transactive
energy framework, and smart grid consortium
that have all come under grid-wise architecture.
And we finally are having a group that's looking at
a federated view of the system of the grid, we've
never had it before, most people don't even know about it.
We'll get the job done and we won't get a lot of pay for it,
but we'll be happy afterwards.
Sounds great, what's left to do?
This is for you guys.
This is the slide you have to remember.
Integrated energy system planning,
you heard Gary talk about it.
The biggest single opportunity for our state to get these
things to accelerate is integrated energy system planning.
You don't need 10 supercomputers.
Make visible evolution pathway and
economic opportunities of stakeholders.
With the first, we can show all the stakeholders
that are arguing at PSC meeting what the real numbers are,
that's even the best, that's almost more fun than anything.
Move from demonstrations to scale up developments,
we don't need more demonstration sites.
We actually have to create sites that allow our companies
and our utility to scale things up.
Develop localized template designs,
you could have templates that we could develop
at a very low cost that different cities
and people in Wisconsin could use.
Absolutely.
And finally, see the grid as networks and architectures.
So I'm one minute over, but considering
I had to do that subliminal slide thing.
(applause)
- I thank you, I realize we stand between you and lunch.
But we are happy to take some questions and
I think it looks like we've got a couple.
First off, when I mentioned that mantra that you have to
chant in order to get an advanced energy economy,
Bruce is my Buddha. (laughter)
You mentioned issues with blockchain,
can you explain how secure is the encryption?
No. (laughs)
- I can explain. - Yeah, go ahead Bruce.
- It depends if you wanna hear this so, oh yeah.
Well, the best way I explain blockchain is you guys all
have to hold up your hands, and this isn't anything dirty,
but it's the idea of here's a packet of data,
and here's a packet of data,
this is the simplest explanation.
You take these two fingers and you go like this.
And what that means is that each packet has
another part of the packet, if I were to explain.
And that is an elegant idea for security.
On top of that, each next packet is actually
put on with a serial-based encryption system.
So each next packet has a different formula
for having these two interlocked,
so that is very, very secure.
I'm not sure that engineers really
doubt the basic efficacy of that.
What you hear about problems with security
in blockchain is how people use it.
How they, the two ends where the encryption and decryption
are encoding, and the recryption, that's a little word,
I make up words all the time, but.
So they're really worried about these conversion points,
not so much this elegantly simple idea of these bit strings
each having a unique link between each next byte.
So that's how blockchain works.
Now you are experts, you can tell all your kids.
But it also explains that it's really the conversion
and what people do at the conversion which is
to get the encryption, decryption and recryption
for the next transaction that is usually the problem
that people refer, because that's not
as sure as the basic algorithm.
- What are your thoughts on grid neutrality concept
promoted by John Wenninghoff and James Tong,
should we work for that in Wisconsin?
We were all a part of a project that
Wenninghoff and Tong I think were a part of.
Again where we kind of had to envision
an energy system in the future.
And...
Basically with the similar concept of net neutrality is
you sort of have an energy system that was sort of just
open and for public use as we all become,
in the future,
energy generators and energy storage systems
with our plug-in hybrid and Tesla system and
we'd all have of course smart homes and be trading
electrons on a transactive energy network.
I think it's kind of getting a little ahead of the
discussion, I think it's worth talking about.
But I do think that we have to kind of take this
as an evolutionary process.
We have had this energy system, as I kind of explained,
for a hundred plus years, and now disruptive technologies
came within really just, in many ways the last five years.
And I think there's many more on the horizon.
And so I think we're just starting to grapple with
how do we combine these technologies and then lifestyle
changes, which gets us to the grid neutrality question,
in order to manage an energy system differently.
And then we have all of this legacy and cumbersome
regulation that we have to untangle.
And then we have sort of moral responsibilities of
making sure that everybody still continues to get equal
access to energy, and that where we've asked the electric
utility to guarantee that, and there was a price for that,
which of course they won't explain to you very well.
So I'm kind of ducking the question, I admit it.
But I think we just have to let some of that evolutionary
process play out, especially with new technologies.
This is really analogous to really when the Internet came.
I sometimes don't like to draw that analogy.
And oh, by the way, Bruce did invent the Internet,
as opposed to Al Gore, but... (Bruce laughs)
That's an inside joke.
But I think we just need to sort of let this
evolutionary process play out in the technology market,
in the business market, and policy is always playing
catch up, that's been my whole life story.
I worked in policy for, what is it, 160 years?
And we will get there, but it's just gonna be challenging.
Because again, we're gonna need the utility,
the utility's invested in all this infrastructure.
We can just say, oh, they're a problem, here,
take all these stranded assets and deal with them.
But I think as a society we will find rational
ways to deal with that transition.
And utilities will be a part of it, but I think all of you
will be a much bigger part of your energy system.
So that's my answer to the question and I apologize
that I did duck it just a bit.
But I think we're out of time, so thank you for listening.
(applause)