rf_engineer
join:2003-08-04
USA
| reply to htwnrver
Re: I don't understand
I think the grid management movement (for lack of a better term) is similar to the "Information Superhighway" rhetoric we heard in the 90's. The Information Superhighway was always there, it was called the Internet. The rhetoric just brought it out into the forefront and made it mainstream. Like the Information Superhighway, the grid management movement is being propelled by political rhetoric, which was brought on by the blackouts and energy issues. The vehicle for bringing grid management has been around for years; it's called PLC, a low bandwidth BPL that has been around for years and in use extensively.
I've heard some say that the higher bandwidths of BPL could provide better grid management, but I'm hard pressed to figure out how. Equipment and line measurements can be crunched into rather "small" binary numbers and don't take up a lot of bandwidth. Controlling equipment takes even less information. Perhaps putting video cameras on poles could use this extra bandwidth, but is that really practical grid management?
The Red Herring article implies BPL is the only way to bring automatic meter reading (AMR). This isn't the case, there are several established AMR companies and a statistic I found from last year says that power system AMR penetration is at about 21% in the US.
Also, what about all the repeaters you need to make BPL work? PLC doesn't need nearly the number of repeaters. The network cost per managed network element must be huge with BPL when compared to PLC. I'm not an expert in power systems, but it would seem to me that automatic meter reading companies using PLC would be expanding their systems to include full grid management. Any utility with an existing investment in automatic metering reading infrastructure could gracefully slide into grid management applications without having to build a BPL network. |
