Because of the large line loss on the grid. No matter how smart they try and make the 'system' it is not very efficient.
The money would be better spent creating many small power plants: home fuel cell (run off LPG and NG), small wind turbine, and photovolt roof arrays. In addition a national campaign to replace CFL and regular light bulbs with High Quality LED lighting would provide a tremendous drop in the load on the system. Not only could it provide a lot of good paying jobs in the process, but the cost benefit would be better.
Excess generation to be put back into the local grid rather than lost, via line resistance, move the electricity over hundreds of miles of wire.
Accenture, a consulting company at the forefront of many IT and infrastructure projects, outlined some of its smart grid efforts at its analyst meeting last week and CEO Bill Green shed some light on the state of the U.S. stimulus funding. In an odd twist, the U.S. government’s effort to prime the economic pump may have actually delayed some smart grid development projects.
Simply put, the stimulus funding, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, is still making its way to infrastructure projects but the impact on the health care, public sector and smart grid has been fairly limited.
Here’s a look at Green’s comments as I detailed them on ZDNet:
I think, by and large, anyone who says stimulus is going to save their day is nuts, because in the system, the stuff is held up. And a lot of the stimulus money, quite frankly, has been used just to top up budgets that used to be there, that disappeared because of low revenues and things like that.
But there are things that matter — certainly, the Smart Grid thing. The stimulus thing actually slowed down Smart Grid initiatives as people waited to see if they could get stimulus money to spend that, instead of their own money. And so there’s just some interesting phenomenas. The health thing really hasn’t hit yet. How the money transfers into education hasn’t hit yet — and in other public services.
And then I think the people’s great disappointment in North America was how it transferred into the infrastructure build-out, whereas China, on Friday — they said they were going to stimulate. And, on Monday, they started building bridges. And so if you look at it around the world, it’s impacted in a very different way.
I think what the thing is — maybe what’s more important is — isn’t the stimulus per say. It’s the focus on what we need to be investing in. And one of the things we’ve done is — we believe there is a wave of infrastructure spending across the globe.
Green’s comments raise an interesting question. Is the long-term effect of stimulus efforts really more about the prioritizing of projects or the funding?
Illustration: GE/Ecomagination
