What I'm actually up to...

I apologize to all our active readers for the delayed post - it's the end of term for me so things are a bit hectic.

I'm taking my Master's of Engineering in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada. I'm focusing on a stream of courses that focuses on sustainable energy.

 

So this first term I took "Sustainable Distributed Energy" and "Power Systems". The first course covers all the broader technical implications of distributed generation (DG) -ie solar panels, wind turbines, biogas, geothermal scattered here and there all providing power to the grid. It's fairly interesting though so broad that I'm worried what he's going to throw at us for the final. Things that we have covered include all the benefits of having DG as well as all the many, many technical issues that need to be addressed when installing DG.

The main points come down to this:

1. The electrical grid wasn't really set up to handle power being generated all over the place and so lots of the equipment (especially protection devices) need to be considered when analyzing where DG can be installed
2. Renewable DG power (mainly solar and wind) is highly variable and may not match the demand at any given instant. So we need "dispatchable" energy (coal, hydro, etc) that we can turn on and off as needed to fill in the gaps left by renewable energy. This is somewhat a matter of perspective since if you had 1000's of acres of solar panels and wind farms then you would be able to order what you need when you need it. But it is true, 10billion solar panels won't do you much good at midnight.
3. Renewable DG (again mainly solar and some wind turbines) give a very different quality of power that needs to be dealt with. Sometimes the DG can actually help improve the quality of the power but because it's brand new technology it's not allowed quite yet for a number of other reasons. (Oh yes, electricity has quality! And when all your electronics are connected, especially the discount electronics, the power quality goes to pot.)

 

My other course is "Power Systems" - a very standard electrical power engineering course. Just a whole lot of math concerning how to calculate power at points all over the grid as well as other things (stability of the grid, reactions to various fault conditions, etc) It's a lot of complex (as in a + bi) number crunching and not what I'm interested in but fairly foundational to everything else so I'm glad I'm taking it.

 

These courses have given me quite an appreciation for the power grid. It really is probably one of the most complexly, interconnected systems in the world and it's really cool to begin to understand it.

 

And I think this is where this blog has given me food for thought. Through my course projects and looking back at my career I've realized that I'm more interested in facilitating change or looking at the bigger picture than actually designing more efficient solar panels or wind turbines. And through writing this blog I've realized (or verbalized something I already knew) that the real change that needs facilitating is here in North America, not in the developing world. So maybe all this questioning of Mr Easterly will really make me plant my feet firmly on this side of the ocean (don't tell my wife that though!).

 

In ending, I'd like to recommend one website, http://www.grist.org/. It's often fairly light but scattered with new ways of looking at society and the way we could or should be doing things.

Kurtis (Waterloo)