Lighting Up

Text: Michael Rohde, Managing Director, Illustration: Peter Bartels

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Science-fic­tion writ­ers all agree on one thing: The future is elec­tric. Whether the sto­ry involves a megac­i­ty, a space­ship, or a giant robot: Every­thing beeps, puls­es, and lights up. Depend­ing on which fan­ta­sy world we are inhab­it­ing, the nec­es­sary pow­er might come from fic­tion­al dilithi­um crys­tals, orbital solar col­lec­tors, or matter/antimatter reac­tors. Sci-fi authors are always com­ing up with new ideas in this area.

They don’t seem to spend quite as much time, how­ev­er, think­ing about how the pow­er will get from A to B. But the clean­est method of ener­gy use will only bring about real glob­al progress when users can reli­ably draw pow­er from the sock­et. And that is pre­cise­ly what we are unable to guar­an­tee with the means we cur­rent­ly have avail­able, as the grids are not yet fit for the future. What does that mean? To answer that ques­tion, let’s take a look at the con­cepts of con­sump­tion and gen­er­a­tion.

More, More, More!

There is no stop­ping the growth of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. In a few decades, it will pass the 10-bil­lion mark. All of these peo­ple need ener­gy: for elec­tri­cal pow­er, for cook­ing, for mobil­i­ty, and for heat­ing and cool­ing. At the moment, almost 80 per­cent of pri­ma­ry ener­gy sources are fos­sil fuels. And we all know what the con­se­quences are when we burn these fuels. Experts agree that rapid elec­tri­fi­ca­tion is the only way to achieve the decar­boniza­tion that we urgent­ly require. This shift, com­bined with the growth in pop­u­la­tion, will increase the absolute elec­tric­i­ty demand.

The increas­ing demand per capi­ta will result in fur­ther accel­er­a­tion. This also applies to mature economies, even though tech­nol­o­gy is becom­ing more and more ener­gy effi­cient. The sim­ple truth is that once you start using devices, you find you need more and more of them. The accu­mu­la­tion of lots of lit­tle ener­gy guz­zlers is an inte­gral part of the con­cept of the smart home, to say noth­ing of the serv­er farms that will be pop­ping up every­where. In the new­ly indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries, demand is ris­ing even more quick­ly. As it would be far too expen­sive to estab­lish line con­nec­tions to a pow­er grid, remote regions plan to use off-grid solu­tions – sup­plied via a com­bi­na­tion of renew­able sources – for the pur­pos­es of elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. Pow­er will bring light and inter­net access – accord­ing to soci­ol­o­gists, these are the key pre­req­ui­sites for achiev­ing social devel­op­ment through edu­ca­tion in these regions.

Away from the remote regions, the glob­al trend toward urban­iza­tion will result in large met­ro­pol­i­tan areas – by 2035, it is esti­mat­ed that two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion will be liv­ing in cities. It is impos­si­ble to imag­ine an infra­struc­ture for clus­ters with 30 mil­lion inhab­i­tants or more with­out exten­sive elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. Thanks to advanced bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy, com­muters will use autonomous elec­tric taxis to get to work. The next gen­er­a­tion after that may well be using elec­tric heli­copters.

So the mes­sage is clear: Decar­boniza­tion is only pos­si­ble with exten­sive elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. Just under a quar­ter of the world’s pri­ma­ry ener­gy con­sump­tion is cur­rent­ly used to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty. Over 75 per­cent of the elec­tric­i­ty is still pro­duced from fos­sil fuels. So if the experts believe that every­thing should be elec­tric, is this a gigan­tic glob­al prob­lem that can­not be solved? Not at all – because elec­tri­fi­ca­tion pro­vides a huge range of options when it comes to con­vert­ing between dif­fer­ent types of ener­gy (“pow­er-to‑X”) as well as a choice between cen­tral­ized and dis­persed solu­tions.

One for all or all for all?

At the moment, west­ern indus­tri­al nations and emerg­ing economies such as India, Chi­na, and South­east Asia gen­er­al­ly have large-scale fos­sil-fuel pow­er plants with large rotat­ing tur­bines and gen­er­a­tors which were built fair­ly close to the load cen­ters and to each oth­er (effec­tive­ly region­al­ly cen­tralized).

This approach has sev­er­al advantages:The large rotat­ing mass­es of the cen­tral­ized pow­er plants have so much stored ener­gy that they have a sta­bi­liz­ing effect on con­tin­u­al con­sump­tion fluc­tu­a­tions and increas­ing volatil­i­ty in the grid caused by feed-ins from renew­able sources – when a sub­way train starts up, it doesn’t cause the grid to wob­ble. There is no need for long cables to trans­mit pow­er over large dis­tances. The rel­a­tive prox­im­i­ty ensures high lev­els of resilience and avail­abil­i­ty for the over­all sys­tem.

„In tomorrow‘s world, the Focus will be on charg­ing rather than burn­ing. If we want to save the plan­et, the pow­er we use Needs to be clean.”

If we are going to form teams for the future, there are essen­tial­ly two sides to choose from: the cen­tral­ized solu­tion and the dis­persed solu­tion. The first team wants elec­tric­i­ty to con­tin­ue to be gen­er­at­ed in large-scale pow­er plants based increas­ing­ly on renew­able sources. These kinds of plants already exist in the form of off­shore wind farms, large-scale PV pow­er plants, and hydro­elec­tric pow­er plants.

These cen­tral­ized renew­able approach­es require a tran­sre­gion­al “super­grid” with a high trans­mis­sion capac­i­ty (and there­fore poten­tial­ly high vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty) to even out the sup­ply and com­pen­sate for the volatil­i­ty of the renew­able sources. And solu­tions also need to be found with regard to the loss of the iner­tia from the large rotat­ing mass­es. This is not such an impos­si­ble task – the gen­er­a­tor of the decom­mis­sioned Bib­lis nuclear pow­er plant, for exam­ple, is now used as a “rotat­ing phase shifter” for pre­cise­ly this pur­pose.

In all prob­a­bil­i­ty, we won’t have a cen­tral­ized solar pow­er plant orbit­ing the Earth in 150 years. But why should we assume that our children’s chil­dren – who might well greet our cur­rent approach­es with an indul­gent smile – won’t find their own new solu­tions? And if, in 150,000 years, we are putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es to a Dyson sphere around our sun, many of our prob­lems could indeed be solved.

If you’re not con­vinced by the cen­tral­ized ap­proach, you might be a fan of the dis­persed solu­tion instead: Hav­ing lots of small-scale pro­duc­ers of renew­able ener­gy gen­er­at­ing pow­er, tak­ing what they need, and feed­ing the rest into the grid in order to com­pen­sate for the deficits of oth­er pro­duc­ers. Per­haps in 150 years every cen­time­ter of roof space will be cov­ered with high-per­for­mance pho­to­volta­ic instal­la­tions so that every­one can help each oth­er out. This won’t make the megac­i­ties self-suf­fi­cient. They will still need an “umbil­i­cal cord” to con­nect them to large ener­gy sources from the grid.

In this con­text, China’s govern­ment is already dream­ing of a glob­al grid capa­ble of mov­ing pow­er all over the world. Along­side the nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy, the dis­persed solu­tion also requires bet­ter stor­age options than the ones cur­rent­ly avail­able. “Pow­er-to‑X solu­tions” for exam­ple, where hydro­gen or methane is pro­duced from wind or solar pow­er in sev­er­al stages, stored in huge cav­erns, and then burned in a cli­mate-neu­tral process in a pow­er plant or mobile sys­tem when need­ed.

Educational Mission for the Grids

Now we have reached the point where we have to talk about trans­port­ing pow­er – the part that sci­ence fic­tion so shame­ful­ly fails to address. Whether you favor the cen­tral­ized or dis­persed solu­tion, the gigan­tic amounts of pow­er that we will need by 2168 will have to actu­al­ly get to the con­sumer some­how. Peo­ple often cite analo­gies of our tran­si­tion from a wired tele­phone sys­tem to broad­band wire­less trans­mis­sion as proof that we could switch to wire­less pow­er trans­mis­sion in the future. But although they might not belong in the realms of sci-fi, there are often sim­ple phys­i­cal rea­sons why these ideas can­not be achieved in real­i­ty.

We might poten­tial­ly be capa­ble of send­ing ener­gy from a solar pow­er plant in geo­sta­tion­ary orbit to the Earth via microwave radi­a­tion even now – but good luck to any crea­ture or device that gets in the way of the rays. Bridg­ing large dis­tances using induc­tion is a sim­i­lar­ly capri­cious process from a phys­i­cal per­spec­tive. So we won’t be aban­don­ing cables that quick­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly as we can’t sim­ply replace the exist­ing infra­struc­ture overnight.

But the grids are still going to change, partic­ularly when it comes to grid man­age­ment and state assess­ment solu­tions. This will present grid oper­ators – and there­fore man­u­fac­tur­ers like MR – with major chal­lenges. If we are head­ing toward a dispers­ed solu­tion in the future where the grid is divid­ed into micro-grids for sep­a­rate parts of the city or nano-grids for sin­gle house­holds, we will need a new way of think­ing.

Today’s cen­tral­ized approach to man­ag­ing pow­er gen­er­a­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion will become obso­lete, as decen­tral­iza­tion will cause grid man­age­ment require­ments to rise expo­nen­tial­ly. Grid oper­a­tors will have to keep track of count­less inter­de­pen­dent fac­tors. What lev­el of ener­gy demand is expect­ed tomor­row? What will the weath­er con­di­tions be like? How full are my ener­gy stores? And so on and so forth. All of this will result in huge vol­umes of data that can only be processed with a quan­tum com­put­er linked to the cloud. But will such a thing exist in 150 years? That is why we need the right soft­ware solu­tions.

Safe and Secure

Both solu­tions also pose cer­tain chal­lenges in terms of resilience. Cen­tral infra­struc­tures in par­tic­u­lar, like the large “umbil­i­cal cords”, need to be pro­tect­ed against attacks. More dis­persed solu­tions have the intrin­sic advan­tage that they can form more inher­ent­ly sta­ble cyber­net­ic sys­tems. If one part is switched off, the rest of the sys­tem keeps run­ning. After an attack, traf­fic would keep mov­ing, the lights would still be on in hos­pi­tal oper­at­ing rooms, and Net­flix 4D would prob­a­bly still be work­ing on most TVs (or, in 150 years’ time, maybe on video inter­faces implant­ed on our optic nerves).

“The Change in the ener­gy indus­try will be rad­i­cal. Intel­li­gent Soft­ware will increas­ing­ly replace func­tion­al Hard­ware.”

Mean­while, the fault can be iden­ti­fied and rec­ti­fied in the back­ground and every­thing can quick­ly be brought back to full capac­i­ty. How­ev­er: Com­plex, net­worked, dis­persed sys­tems require sophis­ti­cat­ed, intel­li­gent sys­tem archi­tec­ture. It took evo­lu­tion a few mil­lion years to cre­ate the semi-suc­cess­ful, semi-resilient cyber­net­ic sys­tem known as the human being. At least we keep breath­ing after a knock­out – prompt­ly fol­lowed by a reboot and a headache.

What Does Disruption Feel Like?

The change in the ener­gy indus­try will be rad­i­cal, as decar­boniza­tion will push us toward more decen­tral­iza­tion. This will change the hard­ware of today’s work­hors­es – the actu­a­tors – and will require much more intel­li­gence when it comes to grid and sys­tem man­age­ment with sen­sors and com­mu­ni­ca­tion and soft­ware. Pow­er elec­tron­ic solu­tions will grad­u­al­ly replace con­ven­tion­al trans­form­ers. MR’s prod­ucts will be focused on this area in 50 years’ time – we know that already. Change brings great oppor­tu­ni­ties with it, and com­pa­nies need to take action if they want to be suc­cess­ful.

We need to face the future with courage rather than fear. We don’t know yet what life will be like in 100 years – that will all depend on what hap­pens between now and then. And how­ev­er huge this change may be for grid oper­ators and their sup­pli­ers, the effect on the aver­age elec­tric­i­ty con­sumer in mature economies will not be so severe if politi­cians final­ly man­age to cre­ate the right frame­work con­di­tions for a comprehen­sive decar­boniza­tion ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion. The impact is like­ly to be felt more strong­ly in the new­ly indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries and megac­i­ties – with rad­i­cal changes to ener­gy use in a future that, for now, still seems to belong in sci­ence fic­tion. We’re ready for the future – bring it on!