"Workshop on Smart Grid and Renewable Energy"
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Speaker: |
Dr.
Saifur
Rahman,
Joseph R. Loring Professor and Director
Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute, Arlington, VA, USA
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Date & time: |
Monday, 17th
August 2009 2:00 p.m. until 5:30 p.m. (Registration commences at 1:30
p.m.)
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Program |
Lecture: 2:00
p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
What is the Smart Grid and What is Needed to Make it a Reality
Tutorial: 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Role of Renewable Energy
in Mitigating the Need for Large Central Station Power Plants
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Venue: |
Seminar Room 1, 2nd Storey,
NUS Shaw Foundation Alumni House, 11 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119244
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What is
the Smart Grid and What is Needed to Make it a Reality
The
concept of the Smart Grid originated from the desire to make the grid-starting
from the power station to the end-use device - smarter, safer, and more reliable
using advanced sensors, communication technologies and distributed computing. A
smart grid will look more like the Internet, where information about the state
of the grid can be exchanged quickly over large distances. It will also allow
integration of new sustainable energy sources, such as wind, solar, off-shore
electricity, etc. There are four attributes of the Smart Grid that need to work
interactively for this concept to be a reality. These are: Technology,
Standards, Public Awareness and a Policy of Incentives.
At
present there are efforts from vendors to develop technologies which will become
building blocks of this grid. At the same time standards are being developed
which will make technologies from different vendors interoperable so that many
players will be able to participate giving customers a broad choice. But all of
these will depend on whether the public will find value in participating in this
opportunity. And this will depend on two things – awareness and incentives –
which are interrelated. The public must be made aware of the benefits of
participating, and at the same time there must be incentives for them. There
must be policies and regulations in place that will encourage participation by
creating a differential pricing structure for the electricity consumed.
Role
of Renewable Energy in Mitigating the Need for Large Central Station Power
Plants
Historically, renewable energy sources have been small scale, distributed and
close to where people live thus filling the need for on-site sources of
electricity. While this market continues to grow in most developing and some
industrialized countries, there is now a new market for large-scale non-hydro
renewable energy sources in Asia, Europe and North America. In some countries
like Denmark, over 10% of the country’s total electricity supply now comes from
wind energy. In the US there are proposals to produce 20% of the country’s total
electricity needs from wind energy by 2020. In many parts of the United States
electricity from wind is cost competitive with that from coal without any carbon
credit. At present, the worldwide generation of electricity from wind exceeds
100,000 MW and countries like Germany, USA, Spain, China and India each has over
10,000 MW of installed wind generation capacity. Due to concerns about
greenhouse gas emissions, high cost, lack of availability of cooling water and
nuclear spent fuel processing, there is now a serious interest among electric
utility planners to consider large-scale (hundreds of megawatts) wind and solar
power plants in place of large central station coal and nuclear power plants.
Renewable
energy sources can fill the need for both stand‐alone remote area electricity
needs, and large-scale central station power plants. Small scale renewable
sources of electricity including solar, wind, biogas and small-scale hydro offer
opportunities to provide electricity to the disadvantaged thus allowing them to
benefit from electrical lights, televisions, computers, internet, mobile phones,
etc. The commercial, educational, social and healthcare benefits brought in by
these technologies to the disadvantaged population in the developing countries
is a great hallmark of the late 20th and the early 21st century. On the other
hand, due to the investments made and policy support provided in several
industrialized countries to reduce carbon emissions from the production of
electricity, there is now a robust market for wind and solar energy projects in
many countries – both developing and industrialized. This presentation will
address such issues and highlight the success stories and future plans for the
growth in renewable energy technologies globally.
