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发帖数: 441 | 1 老美体会到了中央集权的好处了。
What U.S. utilities can learn from China’s smart grid expansion
China’s state-owned State Grid Company of China signed a strategic
cooperation agreement last month with General Electric to develop smart grid
protocols in the country. The news was another step toward opening the
world’s second-largest consumer of electricity to cutting edge smart grid
technology. The State Grid Company had previously set an aggressive target
of building a robust smart grid in China by 2020 and plans to invest $600
billion in developing its national smart grid over the next decade. [
Disclosure: GE is an investor in Consert, the company I work for.]
China exceeded the United States in federal smart grid subsidies for the
first time in 2010, and it looks poised to increase that lead if the US
government doesn’t take further action. Utilities in the US are not
centrally controlled like State Grid in China, so investment in smart grid
technology must come from the private sector rather than government funding.
China operates its state-owned industries like businesses. It aims to
decrease the amount of money it must spend to build additional generating
capacity by using existing energy production with smart grid technology.
Through smart grid installations, China will be able to accurately predict
and control energy consumption, lowering costly demand peaks and decreasing
downtime.
US utilities that are contemplating smart grid investments would be prudent
to consider the undertones of China’s smart grid initiative. China’s
central planners have seen the economic benefits of large-scale smart grid
expansion and are quickly moving to integrate new technologies to realize
that economic promise. US utilities should accelerate plans to add
intelligence and real-time data gathering to their footprint, so that they,
too, reduce the need to build additional generating capacity and lower their
demand peaks. As Jesse Berst writes in SmartGridNews, utility commissions
“focus far too much on the initial, short-run costs instead of total
lifetime cost.”
Utilities should consider programs like the ARRA Smart Grid Investment Grant
Program, which pays 50 percent of eligible project costs for smart grid
development to help modernize their operations. Instead of relying on
estimates of demand, utilities can leverage smart grid technologies such as
device-specific load resource management to better understand the energy
usage of their consumers, so that they can operate more efficiently and
increase profitability by lowering demand peaks. |
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