Economics

2009 Energy Efficiency Indicator Survey

Lynne Kiesling Johnson Controls and the International Facilities Management Association have released their third annual Energy Efficiency Indicator survey. As summarized in this GreenBiz article, More than 70 percent of respondents are paying more attention to energy efficiency now than they were in 2008. Eighty-five percent of executives believe significant legislation mandating energy efficiency and/or …

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Illinois Smart Grid Initiative Final Report

Lynne Kiesling Last year I worked on the project team for the Illinois Smart Grid Initiative, in which we brought together a wide range of stakeholders to discuss the opportunities, benefits, and costs of different models of investing in smart grid infrastructure and technologies. We also discussed the important regulatory institutional changes that would be …

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Whirlpool: Smart Grid Appliances by 2015

Lynne Kiesling Last week Whirlpool announced that by 2015 all of their appliances would have embedded digital intelligence to make them responsive, transactive smart grid devices. There have been a few articles on this point, most recently this Reuters/GreenBiz one. Of course the crucial work here will be in developing open interoperability standards: The home …

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Resilience, Sustainability, and Loosely-coupled Systems

Lynne Kiesling The NIST smart grid interoperability roadmap workshop I attended last week has gotten me thinking about the similarities between system architecture (as the computer systems folks call it) and institutional design (as we political economy social scientists call it). Of course there’s quite a bit of similarity, as the work of the GridWise …

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Peer-to-peer Power Through Microgrids

Lynne Kiesling When we think of concepts like peer-to-peer networks and disintermediation, we usually think of industries that are very Internet-centric. But these concepts can, should, and will apply in electric power networks too: smart grid technology enables peer-to-peer power. The study referenced in that BBC article analyzes the potential for microgrids, and argues that …

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Smart Grid, Complexity, and Swarm Logic

Lynne Kiesling One of the recurring themes here at KP is that smart grid technology makes it possible to harness distributed intelligence in the electric power network, and when you couple that network of distributed intelligence with a decentralized flow of information (such as price signals and market processes), you can get reliability through decentralized …

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