What a smart grid doesn't look like

“Heat-related underground cable failures.” They’re the type of problem that can take out power for thousands or tens of thousands of electricity customers when people need it most: during oppressively hot weather that quickly turns non-air-conditioned offices and apartments into Easy-Bake Ovens.

A Pepco failure of that sort, for example, left nearly 2,000 customers in the heart of Washington, DC, without power for days during a wave of record heat in early June 2011. (On a totally unrelated note, why is it heat comes in waves, while cold comes in snaps?) While 2,000 doesn’t sound like much, it makes a difference when they include customers like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which was forced to shut its headquarters during the outage.

FERC, it bears mentioning, is the agency whose mission is to “(a)ssist consumers in obtaining reliable, efficient and sustainable energy services at a reasonable cost through appropriate regulatory and market means.” Oops.

Extreme heat is just one of the things that can cause failures in today’s grid; storms are the most common cause of big blackouts, although everything from wayward balloons to wildlife can lead to a loss of electricity service. Across the US, some 3,419 outages affected more than 17.5 million people in 2010 — an average of about 8,000 customers per outage, according to Eaton Corporation’s 2010 Blackout Tracker annual report. The total time without power came to 3,753 hours, or around 156 days.

Those kinds of failures aren’t just an inconvenience, but an economic burden as well, leading to estimated losses of $119 billion per year in the US alone. Data centers and business computers are especially hard hit. A frightening revelation from Eaton: of companies that experience computer disasters and don’t have a plan for bouncing back, 90 percent go out of business within 18 months.

In China, power outages threaten to put the brakes on the entire nation’s high-speed economy. Its electricity woes are due to a host of problems, some of them grid-related — such as inadequate transmission capacity — others, not. (Hydropower generation has slowed to a dribble during a severe drought.)

All these impacts are things we should see less of with a smarter grid. With the number of power outages currently on the rise year after year, that’s an improvement we can’t make quickly enough.