Jos Meeuwsen from the Technical University Eindhoven has created quite a stir by conceptualizing what could prove to be the ideal solution to upgrading the outdated electricity grids across Europe to meet increasing demand.

Post-doctoral research, which he didn’t even intend for publication, has been picked up by a number of science and technical news sites and portals throughout the EU. In it, he sets out three scenarios for the future of the electricity grid demonstrating that in the future everyone who is connected to it will be able to upload and download packages of electrcity to and from the network.

He says that due to security of supply, electricity networks will always be necessary but that it is important to include all possible energy options (including sustainable, coal and nuclear) in scenario development. However, engineers face “new and considerable challenges” in the areas of network and system integration and the development and implementation of new technology.

His vision of the future includes: ‘super networks’, which consist of large-scale production locations, transportation via high voltages, a considerable import of sustainable energy (biomass) and energy from off-shore wind farms. ‘Hybrid networks’ would include large plants with high voltages that originate from offshore wind parks and large biomass stations. Additonally, small-scale generation takes place in and around cities and villages (wind, biomass and solar energy). Finally, in the ‘local’ scenario the number of local generators (micro-cogeneration units, solar panels, small-scale biomass plants) at neighbourhood level and land-based wind turbines will supply demand. Large, industrial processes and small consumers would still make part use of electricity from large-scale production resources.

Whilst businesses and consumers are being urged to be more energy efficient and reduce demand, one of the primary stumbling blocks to improvement in the demand/supply ratio is the outmoded electricity network. In a world where everything is converging towards consumer choice, this is the last bastion of old Henry Ford’s “……so long as it’s Black” philosophy wherby consumers will buy what’s available because it’s available. Those days are rapidly diminishing; ask anyone in the music business how difficult it is to sell ‘packaged’ CDs containing songs from one artist these days.

In Meeuwsen’s world, there will be a step-by-step integration of energy technology, ICT and power electronics that may result in an electricity system that exhibits similarities with the internet. Everyone connected could then, within limits, upload and download packages of electrical energy whenever they wanted.

A rash of power cuts around the UK have hit the headlines in recent days:

In the South, between Basingstoke and Reading, 800 homes experienced a total loss of supply just after 6am on 15th October. On October 19th, thousands of people in North West London were without electricity for six hours when a fault in a local power substation led to electricity failure. Canon Park Tube station was also affected. Then, on October 21st, it was Lancashire’s turn with a 133,000-volt electricity cable catching fire on a bridge over the river Calder near a former power station. It led to the closure of roads in the area and houses having to be evacuated.

Three in seven days – and these are only the ones that hit the headlines. Is this unusual?

Anyone needing to justify a UPS purchase need only take a look at the following statistics: according to The Secretary of State’s Second Report to Parliament on Security of Gas and Electricity Supply in Great Britain – July 2006, published by the DTI (http://www.berr.gov.uk/), between April 2005 and March 2006, the total number of customer interruptions was around 21 million and the total number of customer minutes lost 1,966 million.

Our ever-increasing demand for electricity suggests that the situation will only get worse – not better.

So I visited BWEA29 last week to see what was happening in the world of wind turbines. I have to say I came away thinking about the PC market and multi-media computers in the late 1990s – a solution looking for an application. Why ? Well when you get down to it we have here an industry in the UK which seems to be built on the fact that we have more ‘free wind’ than any other country in Europe. The market is in fact heavily subsidised, the payback periods too long for any serious investor and the industry, like so many power-related ones, lacks a critical break through in energy storage. Couple this to the fact that the output from a wind turbine does not yield the quantities of electricity required outside a wind farm, cannot provide support during a national grid power failure, and you get an idea of the magnitude of the problems this industry faces. I am sure it is emerging as an industry – of that there can be no question – but as yet it is only on a large scale. Even here the price paid to wind turbine farms for what they pump into the national grid is heavily subsidised.

As a marketeer what really struck me about this show was the lack of small innovators. There were lots of consultancies represented but in terms of actual technology and spin-off (excuse the phrase) small-scale hardware or software applications, the industry seems sadly lacking. I was there on the morning of day 2. As the coffee arrived and the caterers prepared for lunch it came as no surprise to see that even some of the smaller exhibitors had decided to leave their stands.

This is a large-scale capital industry. So what about the domestic or small-holder environment ? Have the products really moved on from the ones we saw as kids on Kansas barns in the Wizard of Oz ? Well yes but not down to the size and power output required for a domestic environment. Check out Halus Power Systems – if they ever remake the film I am sure Halus products will be somewhere on the farm.

In terms of securing power supplies, the growing need for basic housekeeping in the data centre is becoming ever more urgent. If I were to ask any data centre manager what their most compelling reason for making changes would be, I bet they’d rank cost reduction way before power continuity. Why?

Firstly because cost reduction is an established boardroom issue and secondly, electricity, as with most other utilities in the developed world, is still taken for granted.  

The Carbon Trust estimates that businesses in the UK waste some 10-20% of the energy they buy through poor control. The prospect of energy rationing has already been tabled in Parliament in the UK and in 2006, hosting companies in the centre of
London were vying with the Underground to secure enough power to feed their huge data centres beneath the city’s streets.  

According to Sun Microsystems, between eight and ten percent of servers in data centres have no identifiable function. The company announced in August that it had cut the number of racks of its own servers from 95 to five. It also recently consolidated multiple European data centres into one facility in Hampshire, thus reducing server and storage space by 80%.  

Data centre association AFCOM worryingly predicts that over the next five years, power failures and limits on power availability will halt data centre operations at more than 90% of all companies. Research organisation Gartner echoes this by predicting that 50% of current data centres, by 2008, will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment. 

So, what can be done? Here are some tips:  

1. Optimise existing equipment before adding in new server hardware.
2. Archive outdated legacy applications.
3. Turn applications off when they are no longer needed.
4 Reduce storage capacity by outsourcing storage needs.
5. Calculate how much power you actually do consume (it’s astonishing how many businesses don’t know this!).
6. Categorise loads as critical, essential and non-essential to decide what sort of UPS protection each one requires.
7. See if it is possible for separate business units to share servers.
8. Explore initiatives such as Grid Computing and Virtualization: www.grid.globalwatchonline.com and Virtualization – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9. If you do have to purchase new UPS or server equipment, insist that energy efficiency is a leading criterion.

Energy management and control will continue to grow into the ‘hot topic’ within data centre power management and is a key aspect covered in the Riello UPS Power Protection Guide.

The price of lead has continued to soar this year and recently hit almost US$3,500 a tonne – almost double that of one year ago. Faced with an impossible situation, every lead-acid battery manufacturer has had to come running to its customers with dramatic price increases. Increasing raw material price rises, taxation and movement from a surplus to deficit in supply left them with little option if they wanted their business to survive.

So what can a UPS company do ? Well very little given the long supply chains involved. Most will have to enforce a price increase over the forthcoming period and this may either be to specific ranges or en masse. Large UPS manufacturers like Riello UPS generally have batteries on bought forward contracts and these will help to buffer the impact of the price increases. Eventually though everyone will see batteries at higher prices in the market place.

However, if this was not bad enough, the price of lead has not stabilised and continues to fluctuate. Battery manufacturers are therefore only giving 30 days validity on price lists and quotes. This makes quoting for some UPS jobs, as an example, somewhat precarious, unless the same validity restrictions are quoted.

So what has driven these massive increases. Two factors really – exports from China have been falling rapidly since the impossing of a 10% export tax and their mines have been producing less output. The world economy has moved from one of surplus to deficit and if this continues into 2008 we can all expect to pay higher prices for any of our lead-acid battery-based power systems.

You also have to wonder if certain battery manufacturers have taken the opportunity to cover price rises in other raw materials and optimise pricing across their distribution channels…mmmmh.

I was at The Tenth Fuel Cell Symposium last week and during a follow-up meeting was asked what I thought of the event. This was a difficult one. On the one hand you had a Morgan car prototype showing how they may use a fuel-cell engine in the future. At the other you had boffins – a very English term – showing that they could get a propellor to spin when connected to a small beaker of methanol. When you take three generic forms of power generation – wind turbines, fuel cells and solar power – it is only really solar power that has offered products for installation within fairly easy reach of most individuals and organisations – should they be so inclined. Domestic wind power and fuel cells have yet to find their killer leverage I feel and are held back by natural early life cycle inhibitors such as cost, references, standards and perhaps, too many corporate giants trying to turn these mass markets to their particular solution.

I came across this great feature on the BBC website today – Fuelling The Future. What I like about this page is that it links to several discussing the alternative ways to fuel our country. There is even an energy calculator for the year 2020. This allows you to decide the mix of power generation sources you would use to generate sufficient electricity for the UK (381bn kW forecast) and the ramifications of your chosen mix. Fascinating stuff.

The UK has the most potential for wind power out of all the European countries – we have a lot of it apparently. This was not an off-the-cuff remark made by a Eurocrat in Brussells but a fact made by experts in the renewable energy field – wind and wave. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) exhibition in Glasgow takes place next week (9-11 October). The contrast with Power Expo, running the same week, at the other end of the UK at Olympia London, could not be greater. Here you have a new technology that is only as yet being deployed on a large scale. We have yet to see wind turbines deployed en masse from B&Q to our homes but someday it could happen. I am reminded of the early satellite TV dishes which were normally so large you placed them on a concrete platform in your garden – today they are small, discreet and very much common place.

Next week sees Power Expo taking place at Olympia London (10-11 October). Supported by the Association of Manufacturers of Power generating Systems, Power Expo provides a great place to get an overview on independent power generation and all that is happening in that world – there are over 400 exhibitors. Independent power generation is one of those technologies that must be coming up against the wall innovation-wise. After all how far can you develop a combustion engine in terms of efficiency and its ECO-friendliness ? These prime and standby power manufacturers must face some of the hardest competition in the future from alternative energy sources such as fuel-cells.