Japan Looks To Distributed Control Theory To Manage Energy Market Deregulation 54
Hallie Siegel writes: Japan's power industry is currently centralized, but it aims to deregulate by around 2020. Coupled with this major structural market change, the expansion of thermal, nuclear and renewable power generation will place additional demands on the management of the country's energy market. Researchers from the Namerikawa lab at Keio University are working with control engineers, power engineers and economists to designing mechanical and control algorithms that can manage this large-scale problem.
Re:Regulation is the enemy of free markets. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Regulation is the enemy of free markets. (Score:5, Insightful)
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What are you saying? One side of those trades TOTALLY operated in their own best interest..they totally ripped off the banks by lying to them.
Then the banks operated in their own best interest by demanding large amounts of money directly from the gov't to save themselves from their own greed.
The sad thing is regular people have been tricked into believing that it was all done in our best interest.
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Is that deregulation or over-regulation? Seems like they got the natural consequences of their NIMBY policies.
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No, the bigger picture is that government exists for the sake of government, and is left to its own devices it would take over everything if you let it. This has happened many times throughout history, and the Free Market is the best defense against runaway bureaucracy. Always remember that.
I am starting to wonder about that. The government does not exist to protect us from the Robber Barons(tm), and it would not be an efficient way to protect them from us. I am starting to wonder if the government exists to protect them from each other, or something like that.
Re:Regulation is the enemy of free markets. (Score:4, Insightful)
Regulation is required for free markets. And example of a free market gone haywire due to lax or no regulation was the housing market. And without the FDA, you'd feel perfectly safe getting your prescriptions from Joe's Medical Stuff and Bait Store, right? Or maybe you wish to turn safety entirely over to the airlines so that an acceptable level of crashes that can be insured against would work for you. Your car company would never think to cut corners and get you killed dead because they could save on not installing proper safety equipment in their vehicles. Your bank account need not be insured by the FDIC because you mistakenly stuck your money in a bank whose owners absconded with your loot. The food you eat need not be inspected regularly to keep your death from being the result of bad processing. The guard rails on your way to work don't need any standard over keeping you from your freedom to plow straight down a ravine into that swiftly flowing river. The next hurricane won't bother you because you'll be safe in your house which didn't need to conform to hurricane building standards, also see earthquakes.
Your grandmother can come and live with you because of the nursing home fire which was caused because the owners didn't need to conform to fire protection standards. And, by the way, it wiped out the money she kept in her room which was destined for you in her will but which she didn't trust a bank to keep and hence kept it in large denomination bills which, tragically, met their end in the fire.
Need I continue?
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And example of a free market gone haywire due to lax or no regulation was the housing market.
Which regulations were lax or missing? From what I saw it was a pretty heavily regulated market even on the banking side.
And without the FDA, you'd feel perfectly safe getting your prescriptions from Joe's Medical Stuff and Bait Store, right?
No I wouldn't. Who said they would be? This is a straw man argument. And possibly a false dichotomy.
Or maybe you wish to turn safety entirely over to the airlines so that an acceptable level of crashes that can be insured against would work for you. Your car company would never think to cut corners and get you killed dead because they could save on not installing proper safety equipment in their vehicles.
I don't think the parent suggested that torts and other forms of liability should be abolished.
And so on. There are multiple ways that problems like these can and have been resolved, and centralized federal regulation isn't the only choice.
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You needn't continue, you should listen.
Government regulations are the opposite of free markets, free means free of government regulations. Free markets do not go haywire due to lack of government regulations, market did go haywire due to government regulations. Housing market, equity market, now bond market and money markets are all haywire and they are all haywire due to government regulations.
Governments regulate interest rates by ensuring that the so called 'reserve banks' (which have no reserves but o
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Question: Do you buy your electronics from Best Buy (or any other electronics retailer in the US or Canada)? Do you feel they are particularly dangerous?
If the answer is that you do buy electronics in the US or Canada, and that you feel they are safe, congratulations, you believe that regulation is not necessary. UL, CSA, and ETL aren't government agencies. They simply review devices and decide if they meet safety requirements. There is absolutely requirement in the NEC or CEC (the regulations) that re
This is how you deregulate (Score:1)
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This is how you deregulate the energy market: you don't. It always turns into a cartel anyway.
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And which market doesn't degenerate into a cartel?
Spoiler: monopoly.
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In addition to the instantaneous supply demand property - the grid is an electric circuit with ever changing loads that are both capacitive and inductive. Keeping power (both real and reactive) moving efficiently is a non-trivial task.
So this is hard? So is virtually everything we use markets for.
Regulated monopolies (in the US) have an "obligation to serve". If you want power the power company is not allowed to say no, even if the supply is insufficient.
They don't say "no", they just don't deliver at all. That's obviously a vast improvement. And of course, this has nothing to do with markets.
When Apple or Google can put up a data center in a few months from breaking ground to switching it on and draw energy equivalent to a steel mill, but new power plants require more than a decade to site, permit, build, test, and put in service the challenges can be daunting.
And most of the delay is due to California regulation. Again, we have that because this is "daunting", that somehow magically means it can't be done by a market.
Libertarian "markets good - regulation bad" can be as unhinged from reality as creationism. Its bad religion to pretend the world works in accordance with your faith regardless of the data. In these instances free market evangelism isn't an economic theory, its religion.
What data? What reality? I notice you don't bring any up yours
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Indeed. How soon we forget.
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I'll just point out markets do not equal anarchy.
Of course, they don't. Even the most anarchic of markets still have regulation else there is no support for trading, it's just regulation imposed by the traders instead of an external source like a government or powerful leader.
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Actually, it's the other way around. As a market heads towards anarchy, it's the regulation imposed by traders that disappear first.
I'll meet your erroneous generalization with a real world counterexample [wikipedia.org].
Glad they're trusting in the free market (Score:2)
Deregulation already worked so well for their housing market back in the 90's.
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And it worked fairly well for their railway system [citylab.com]. It's not completely without flaws, or without regulations and subsidies, but private companies have demonstrated an ability to create both effective and profitable transportation systems which government run companies could never manage to do. Deregulation and privatization are not panaceas, but they can and do work well when done smartly. Japan seems to at least have a track record of success in this area.
Japanese Reagan strikes again (Score:3)
What a brilliant idea, especially in the wake of a nuclear power accident!
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No, I'm pretty sure the wake was from the tsunami.
How Does One Pronounce "Enron" in Japanese? (Score:1)
Actually, this is not so much "Deregulation" as "Reregulation".
A new National Grid under Central control, with Free-er Market solutions at the Generation level.
Of course, something corrupt like CALISO may occur, but there is always _some_ corruption.
50 Hz vs 60 Hz (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be impressed if they can figure out how to link the east side of the country (50 Hz) with the west (wired later at 60 Hz).
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HVDC tie lines and rotary frequency converters can do this. There are many instances of this in the US interconnection, just look where the Amtrak network (25 Hz) [wikipedia.org] connects to the transmission grid (60 Hz).
It's all a matter of how much money are you willing to spend for the additional reliability. Until the nukes went offline, Japan's two grids were self-sufficient enough that transferring energy between the two wasn't cost effective to justify a highly connected interface. By the time you needed it, it
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There is such a thing as TW scale powerconversion. You just need to order it.
Most long distance runs are HVDV [wikipedia.org] because that has lower losses. The same equipment can be used to convert from 50 Hz to DC to 60 Hz and back.
The reason this was a problem during the Fukishima disaster is that there was no time to make it. Not that it was not possible to make it.
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Sorry, that should have been "GW scale powerconversion". TW scale in a single location is technically possible but not done as of yet.
For scale: the average power consumption over 2010 was approximately 17 TW.
Re: 50 Hz vs 60 Hz (Score:1)
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Yes this was going to be my comment. Good luck doing that through deregulation! The only hope would be that some government is forward thinking enough to regulate the change to force the issue, you know for the good of everyone in the future. Deregulation to corporations that have much smaller frames of reference (profit quarters), pretty much ensures that it will never happen, or at least in the foreseeable future.
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You still have the same system wide frequency compensation and phase margin (not related to AC phase) problems which overshadow AC phase matching.
DC is only more efficient when long d
Regulation PRESERVES free markets (Score:3)
Regulation helps to keep markets free and open by preventing abuse of the system. Your libertarian lies are worthless here.
Sounds great.. NOT (Score:2)
I mean, energy deregulation and the "free market" worked *so* well in California a dozen years ago. (This assumes that slashdotters reading this are old enough to remember that, or are at least willing to read the news stories about the criminals selling the energy....)
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