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The Grid, Our Cars, and the Net
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat May 09, 2009 07:32 PM
from the one-idea-to-link-them-all dept.
from the one-idea-to-link-them-all dept.
Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. "'Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,' said Chase. 'It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.' And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. ... Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open."
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great idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Regarding the US: Mass transit is fine for many but certainly not all people living in urban areas, a lot fewer people who live in the suburbs, and almost nobody who lives in rural areas. The nearest grocery store to my house is 18 miles away. Mass transit would be an extremely inefficient method of transport out here. Either you'd have to eat a really, really big cost-per-ride bill while providing some semblance of decent and frequent service, or you'd have to provide really, really poor, infrequent, PITA
Re:Sure, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Regarding the US: Mass transit is fine for many but certainly not all people living in urban areas, a lot fewer people who live in the suburbs, and almost nobody who lives in rural areas. The nearest grocery store to my house is 18 miles away. Mass transit would be an extremely inefficient method of transport out here.
If you build roads and no transit you get the US-style sprawl you describe. If you build transit and only minimal roads you get high-density transit-friendly development.
The transport infrastructure "drives" the style of city you get. Build it and they come.
Parent
Re:Sure, but (Score:4, Insightful)
His point was that public transportation is useless for rural U.S., and that no amount of infrastructure re-organization will ameliorate the need for private vehicles in those areas.
Public trans. is great for cities; we need more of it there, no doubt. I live in a city and work 8 miles from my home (in a neighboring city) - using the current bus system actually takes more time than walking there directly (2.5 hrs vs. 2 hrs), and I feel a little guilty about driving so short a distance.
But the need for privately owned vehicles will never go away in the U.S. - at least not until our population exceeds some 2 billion or more people, and given that our birth rate has just recently fallen below the rate of replenishment (yay!), it'll be a good long time before that happens, if ever.
We have a need, more than any other industrial nation (save maybe Australia), for clean and efficient cars. The fact that our auto industry is so very reluctant to supply them demands a paradigm shift. If I, as a layman, can design a 3 person vehicle that gets 180 miles to the gallon (of biodiesel) based on existing designs and current technology, what exactly is the holdup?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the holdup is supply-and-demand. even though you can build it, would anyone buy your eco-friendly biodiesel? i can think of only a few that might [southparkstudios.com], unless the gov't starts forcing people to buy them. in light of the recent detriot bailouts, that may very well happen.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My point isn't that mass transit should be ignored, or that we shouldn't look at doing it in a more effective way where it makes sense, but that wide scale mass transit that has as a stated goal of replacing the automobile in most circumstances, even in rural America, would not be advisable. There are about 303 people per square mile in France (non-euro territories not included), compared to 33 people per square mile in the US (excluding Alaska's area). I've excluded the no-mans-land of Alaska from this equ
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Mass transit is far older than the automobile and has had closer runins with extinction. The automobile is far from a dinosaur. If you owned one you'd probably realize that. It may need to be altered over time with new fuels etc, but this idea that cars are dead is idiotic political spin.
Some car companies may be in bad shape, but that has less to do with their end product than it has to do with extremely bad buisiness management and labor costs.
Not that I have anything against
Re:Sure, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Cars are not inherently inefficient.
And neither are SUV's.
The energy expenditure comes from moving mass, be it of cargo, passengers, or vehicle.
An SUV is a gas-guzzler when used for just a few folks, but it can't be beat if you have heavy and/or bulky cargo to carry. If you have a big family and go on camping trips frequently, an SUV is probably the best way to do transportation. Whether said family should be big enough or go on enough camping trips to make an SUV cost effective to begin with is another matter altogether.
Public transportation or even bicycles are a good thing. Only economics and personal greed stand in the way.
It's one kind of efficiency to reduce energy consumption for a given task. It is quite another to decide if that task should be performed in the first place.
The earth is capable of healing itself if pollution is generated no faster than it can be metabolized away.
It's every earthling's obligation to not harm the earth. However, it's only due to greedy human nature that "what's in it for me" ruins the economics of it. If everyone cared about the common good (cooperated) instead of themselves (defected), then the Game Theory of Life would benefit all.
Pollution is nothing more or less than Tragedy of the Commons.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Drive a smaller car. Drive one that's only 2 seats, and you have a car that is about half as wide and uses half the space.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How many miles are you willing and able to walk to and from work, every day, in all weather conditions, year-round? More to the point: How many HOURS are you willing and able to walk to and from work, every day, in all weather conditions, year-round?
Figure 80 paces/minute cadence (standard military marching pace), 6 steps to 5 yards (standard military marching pace) and you get 12,000 ft/hour, or about 2.3 mph. If you live 5 miles from work, that's over two hours EACH WAY. On a bicycle, that's less than
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, most people don't travel around by military march. The individual, taking his time, walks at 3 mph. A fit individual walking briskly moves at about 4 mph. A power-walker covers ground at 5-6 mph. I know these things because I used to cover around 100 miles on foot every week, for exercise and exploratory purposes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Contrast that with trains which have inconvenient stops located miles-apart, only serve a few people within walking distance of those stops
Maybe you would consider walking distance to a train station an advantage when looking for a new home? People certainly do here, which has stimulated dense development close to train, subway and tram stops.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot's packets are going to get to you via 300,000 WiFi hops?
Payback (Score:3, Funny)
don't bogart it (Score:2)
Imagine it, man. It would be like so many little nets inside of bigger nets going on forever (deep inhale, coughing exhale). Wow, uh, it would be like TRON, only way better. I need a salty snack.
A nationwide mesh cloud will form, (Score:2)
And the crackers and vandals will pee themselves with joy.
Too much to lose (Score:5, Insightful)
Big ISPs and phone companies have too much to lose to allow this to ever happen.
It would be too hard to be tapped by various 3 letter government agencies so they wouldn't like it either.
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Also, a mesh network assumes enough nodes to form a mesh.
This may work great for a town or city, but what about between towns and cities? In the US where there seems to be civilization every mile down the interstate, this may be doable, but if that low-density node goes gown, so does all connectivity.
And what about connecting say, one
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget cars (Score:4, Insightful)
a) consumers choose phones with over phones without
b) we can use it even outside the car and
c) it's not connected to cars (better to stop the car rebellion right there, tyvm).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Fumes (Score:2)
A nation-wide cloud? That sounds pretty bad. I heard the fumes were toxic, that's why I stopped making it in my basement. ... OH! MeSh cloud. I see.
"Only those with something to hide..." (Score:5, Insightful)
I vote thanks but no thanks on this. Despite whatever wild-eyed claims about "openness" or "oneness" or whatever other hippie bullshit the brainchilds of this are spouting, there is absolutely NO information of any kind that is appropriate for my vehicle to be broadcasting. I'm sure the police and Federal government would absolutely LOVE to have a way to track the location of every vehicle in the country, not to mention who owns it and who they're talking to via their built in net cellphone at the time. Integrating this with the idea of a vehicle is a hilariously bad idea, because the instant it comes about there will be DOT, Federal, and State laws with a laundry list of mandates about how "open" this system will be allowed to be to be "roadworthy," and I guarantee you not a single one of these mandates will be in your best interest.
Pass.
If we're going to do the mesh network thing, I'd rather have it in a portable device like a phone or PDA that doesn't give the government a billion inroads to regulate, legislate, and subvert it, and one that I can chose not to buy, to turn off, or to leave at home.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to rain on YOUR parade, but you should read and comprehend my entire post before trying to nitpick.
You can turn your cell phone off, you can leave it at home, or you can chose not to have one. Try doing that with a mesh networking "black box" that's buried somewhere within your car's computer system and the DOT has mandated is illegal to disable or remove (if the future-car-to-be even works without it). If this weird vision of the future comes to be you may just want to invest in a bicycle.
My point wasn
Re:What if the black box is SATAN? (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to break it to you, but this far everything everyone's ever penned on this particular subject because... are you following along with this at home? The technology doesn't exist yet. We don't know. It's an unknown, and anything could happen up to and including nothing at all.
All I'm doing is putting forth a possibility tainted by my own opinion. I'm straightforward enough to be honest about that. Why are you so hell bent on turning speculative opinion into some kind of bullshit personal affront?
While we're on that topic, though, let's look at the track record of our illustrious elected officials. It is already mandated that all cell phones sold in the US come with GPS chipsets capable of transmitting your phone's location. In most cases this can be disabled excepting 911 calls, but the technology is there. Your position can already be triangulated fairly accurately just via cell towers. This is a proven fact. Warrantless wiretapping and general spying on US citizens without cause by the Federal government is so well documented that there's already been massive outcry and a million and one headlines about it. This is a proven fact. OBD2 compliant automobiles sold in the USA are required by the DOT to have black boxes (for lack of a better term) that record vehicle speed, brake status, RPM's, and the other assortment of telemetry available in a modern engine for the sole purpose of the police using it against you in post-crash investigations. This is a proven fact. Traffic cameras are already in place in many locations throughout the country and are not only used to hand out speeding tickets as well as track individual vehicle movement when the police so desire, as has made headlines more than once. This is a proven fact.
None of the above is speculation. People who live off your tax dollars want to know where you are and what you're doing at all times, and the demonstration of this desire is made clear again and again and again. How many stories are posted to Slashdot to the effect of "company developing X technology to recognize faces/scan fingerprints/track crowd movements/snoop on cell or internet conversations?" Count them. How many of them go on to say they're doing it with government funding or for homeland security purposes, and all those other buzzwords? There's a reason Slashdot has a "Your Rights Online" section. There's a reason stories like these are of so much interest.
What is speculation is what will happen if a widespread vehicle based network of no concrete design or aim is put into service. My speculation is that bad things will happen if it is, especially given the track record of the US government both Federal and local in passing mandates involving automotive technology. If you don't agree with my speculation, that's fine. But if you want to blow it out of proportion and turn it into some kind of affront that's all you.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"Only those with something to hide..." (Score:5, Informative)
It is true. Phones are NEVER off, they are in sleep mode.
If by "sleep mode" you mean:
The most important bit there, of course, is "radio turned off". If the radio weren't off, your battery would go dead in a matter of days even when the phone is off, just as it does when the phone is on. It might last a couple days longer off than on, but that's all.
Since that doesn't happen -- turn the phone off with a full battery and turn it on a month later and you'll still have most of a full charge -- that means the radio is off. And if the radio is off, then the FBI can't send your phone any signals telling it to turn anything on.
The CPU being off and the RAM refresh off, by the way, are the reasons that when you turn your phone on it takes anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds to become functional. It's gotta boot.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing of note (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that interested me in the article was this quote, " the Obama Administration allocated $4.5 billion in the stimulus bill for smart grid R&D." So we're getting some kind of smarter grid anyway, at least some research into it.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
She wants anything connected to the smart power distribution grid to communicate using a mesh network with an open design. She thinks that putting the same sort of mesh nodes into vehicles would allow the overall mesh network to function better and, apparently, that it would be useful for something.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One thing of note (Score:5, Interesting)
And why you'd mount it on a car, I'm not sure: the car itself doesn't have too much data to transmit
Some ideas:
And for some privacy nightmare:
Parent
ad-hoc mesh networking (Score:3, Insightful)
15 years ago when i looked at the literature there were substantial problems with the efficiency of the selected routes, route convergence and message overhead. these things got much worse as the rate of change in the peer graph goes up.
have things gotten that much better?
Re: (Score:2)
If you throw enough computing power / bandwidth at it, message overhead and efficiency aren't as much of a problem - particularly for sending boring data packets that can tolerate a little latency and lossiness. We've made huge strides in the past 15 years.
The part I'm trying to figure out is, "why put them in a car?" It's not like the car is a major consumer or producer of data. Is this really going to change all that much? If not, and if non-car-things are to be using this mesh, it seems that you'd be
And exactly WHAT... (Score:4, Insightful)
In 15 words or fewer - what is the point of this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Those who actually bothered to read TFA, what exactly is the point of this? I understand Robin Chase loves feel-good social causes, and she is a good organizer, but no one ever accused her of being an engineer. Having read TFA, it sounds to me a bit like confused meandering of someone trying to figure out how to use some of the stimulus billions for yet another social pet cause, but without the clear definition of what that cause is.
Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
Having read TFA, it sounds to me a bit like confused meandering of someone trying to figure out how to use some of the stimulus billions for yet another social pet cause, but without the clear definition of what that cause is.
My feelings exactly. It has lots of woo-woo words and ideas which seem magical and yet, I can't understand what the fundamental idea is exactly. --It almost sounds like she's suggesting that we use phone system-like switching technology to route power to individual homes and devices.
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It has lots of woo-woo words and ideas which seem magical and yet, I can't understand what the fundamental idea is exactly.
That is actually a great description of anything appearing in Wired...
Inter-vehiclular communications (Score:2)
The Dumb Electrical Grid Is Very Reliable! (Score:3, Insightful)
Folks who write articles about smart grid communicating with cars, etc bring to mind foolish talk of internet toasters and networked refrigerators.
The current electrical grid (speaking of USA; PJM region in particular) is very reliable as it is. Grid operators already have the ability to shape production; with millions of users, usage patterns are easy to spot and plan for ahead of time.
In my view, smart grid and smart meters are simply a way to control people's usage and charging them more; residential electric bills will likely become very complicated.
All this talk about people charging their cars at night and then selling it back during the day for extra credit is nonsense, because when millions of people are charging at night, it's easily conceivable that nightly usage could be just as high as during the day.
In respect to cars communicating with other cars - why? It's obvious that most people will charge their cars as often as possible, even if told not to, in particular, at night so they are sure to have enough charge to get to get the kids to school, get to work, etc.
The internet is another means of communication - it's not going magically solve energy issues nor change human nature.
In my view, a better approach than a so-called smart grid is developing / promoting more efficient energy production methods, in particular nuclear (solar, wind, etc are nice, but are lacking in energy density), along with encouraging people to produce some of their own energy for their needs, such as with solar panels on their roof.
Ron
Plus, electrical demand is != bandwidth demand. (Score:4, Informative)
I did a lot of tariff programming back in the day and I loved it...
Electrical demand is not the same as network demand. If your ISP is short on bandwidth, everyone just slows down. But if your power company is short on power, at worst, they have to start throwing people off of the grid, because everyone must have 110VAC 60hz power.
This reality is reflected in the pricing of electricity, especially for larger customers.
The kind of an electric bill a refinery gets, for example, shows this. In such bills, you start with the raw data obtained from power recorders - every kwh and kvarh (reactive power), is recorded at either 15 minute or hourly increments, depending on the utility. This data is rolled up to look at peak demand, and bill to date usage, broken out into buckets representing time of use, each of which has its own price. For the most part, the demand portion of the bill is roughly half, and the other half is the cumulative portion.
So, of all the actionable items in a bill that one could act on, really, instantaneous demand is the most important thing to optimize. If you jack up your demand during the day, for just one hour, by 50%, you've significantly increased your monthly bill... because the utility still has to have equipment to satisfy peak service.
The thing is, industrial customers have known this now for at least 10 years, if not longer, and there's a whole electrical services industry designed to help them avoid that maximum demand charge. Some companies making ice at night for cooling by day. Others try and have multiple shifts. Still others just put in their own local generation that kicks in when their utility usage gets too high. All of this is controlled by automated SCADA systems that have been field proven for at least a decade, if not longer.
The point is, I'm wondering how much smarter the electrical world can actually get? What you are really talking about is putting residential customers on industrial style tariffs. But, what would be the benefit? I mean, there's not too much a residential customer could practically do that would cost effectively help them lower their peak demand in such a way as to be cost effective.
For example, in California, for SCE, the GS-2 tariff specifies a demand charge of less than $10 / kw. SCE GS2 [sce.com]. If you figure that most homes use less than 2Kw max demand, there's not much room for economical demand shaving. If you lowered your peak demand from 3kw to 2kw, you would be saving $120 a year. There's few, if any devices that could store energy at night, help with peak demand by day, where you could actually recoup that investment economically.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can see the peaks in demand happen every day from internal power dispatching stuff. Systemwide, if you look at PJM LMP prices, for that ISO at least, you can get a good handle on where the peaks occur..
I think really the big thing would not be so much a smart grid but one that can store electricity. If there was anything that humanity needed, it would be a better way to store and transport energy.
Damn it... (Score:5, Funny)