Friday, October 05, 2007

Power generation-usage mismatch

the grid is currently constructed to accommodate capital-intensive fossil fuel plants that need to run 24/7 to be most efficient and economical. The natural load, on the other hand, is the demand for electricity created by people's and the economy's daily rhythm. That demand naturally peaks when people are up and about and falls at night when they're asleep. Renewable energy sources, Mills argues, more closely mirror human behavior. Solar electricity production soars when demand does during the day. At night, stored solar energy and other renewable sources like wind, which tends to blow strongest in the evening, can more closely match lower demand as people and machines wind down.


The end-to-end power consumption grid is a large scale mature system, where infrastructure and control dominates production and use. As any other mature system it eventually gets out of sync with new ways to produce and/or consume goods/services/content/energy.
A mismatch between generation (Source) and consumption (Tool) patterns create an opportunity for new solutions, that enable more dynamic control over the flow of payloads ( electricity, in this particular case).

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