<story><title>Is the smart grid all hot air?</title><url>https://austinvernon.site/blog/smartgrid.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iancarroll</author><text>&amp;gt; Most utilities are switching customers to smart meters that allow remote disconnection of electricity.&lt;p&gt;I learned about this 3-6 months ago when PG&amp;amp;E erroneously remotely disconnected a large number of people in the Bay Area, including my apartment. I walked outside my unit and the entire building had power except for me -- the maintenance team was mystified and said the meter specific to my apartment reported it had been remotely killed.&lt;p&gt;It was impossible to figure out what had happened, and after many hours of vague outage status messages, I was finally able to reach the billing department who said they had been fixing this issue all day, and they remotely reactivated my meter as I was still on the phone with them (they had a whole disclaimer about turning it on remotely too).&lt;p&gt;I got a vague letter and $100 statement credit a month later that admitted an issue accidentally cut off a lot of meters, but no further details on how or why. Very strange experience and made me question the whole smart meter thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is the smart grid all hot air?</title><url>https://austinvernon.site/blog/smartgrid.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Water tank and water pipe analogies fail pretty fast when it comes to thinking about electricity.  Keeping grids energized by real-time management of supply and demand is not much like keeping water or gas flowing through pipes.&lt;p&gt;If you want to examine smart grids, it&amp;#x27;s strange to ignore what&amp;#x27;s been developed in Germany and NW Europe over several decades.  A lot of this revolves around fast communication strategies and supply&amp;#x2F;demand prediction algorithms:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eu.landisgyr.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;grid-control-the-future-of-the-smart-grid-made-in-germany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eu.landisgyr.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;grid-control-the-future-of-the...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;To be able to operate this complex solution infrastructure, Netze BW has applied a so called “traffic light concept”. The green light indicates that no congestion is predicted, while the yellow light is a sign of a potential bottleneck in the grid that might require certain restrictive measures by the market players. For example, a Virtual Power Plant operator would adjust the operating mode of its storage and generation assets to avoid predicted transformer overload. However, despite these actions taken during the yellow phase, the actual technical limits of the electricity network might still be violated in real time due to unforeseen events. In this case, the red light would call for immediate mitigation measures enabled automatically by the REMS system.&amp;quot;</text></comment>