White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Microgrids Offer Community Solution to Electricity Challenge

by Leave a Comment

You may have heard of microgrids in passing, maybe at a town meeting or when the future of your electricity supply is under discussion. Mostly, they aren’t headliners like data centers.

However, microgrids are becoming an important part of the future electric infrastructure. They provide a valve to release some of the pressure building up to supply more electricity to data centers and transportation.

Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering and construction firm, figures that by 2030, 50 percent of in-city deliveries will be made with electric vehicles of all types, and these will have to be charged daily.

There are 700 microgrids operating in the United States, and 7,000 are planned or under construction. While they got off to something of a slow start, they are now going full-speed ahead.

Originally, microgrids were seen as appropriate for military bases, college campuses, and other uses with a defense or social purpose, or for remote locations far from the grid.

Utilities were cool or actively hostile to them, although it can be argued that the first microgrid was established by Thomas Edison in Manhattan.

One utility executive said to me four years ago, “What is it about ‘micro’ that the promoters don’t understand?” Now utilities are beginning to embrace microgrids as part of the solution, not a raid on their customer base.

A microgrid, as explained by the futurist-entrepreneur Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun and its spinoff truCurrent, is a way of bringing “kilowatt-hour liquidity” to the electricity industry, smoothing out the periods when demand meets maximum capacity, often beginning as the sun sets.

It is a self-contained electric generation and localized distribution entity, using storage, renewables, and, at times, traditional generation to create a grid that can operate either independently of the national grid or be connected to it. It is usually separated from but linked to a utility.

Oisin O’Brien, senior director of commercial solutions at truCurrrent, walked me through the dynamics of a microgrid that the company is building for a large food distribution company in Northern California.

Its assignment was to develop a charging station for 30 Daimler electric-tractor trailers used for food distribution. The challenge: To provide 2 megawatts of power for charging the Class 8 trucks during largely off-peak hours. Each truck has a 200-mile range on a single charge and must be charged daily.

On this project, O’Brien explained, truCurrent is working closely with the local utility, PG&E. “We were able to harness the utility’s flexible service program,” he said.

The full power plant — which is awaiting permission to operate from PG&E — will team 800 kilowatts of solar power with battery storage to create a contained system.

Currently, solar collectors are being installed on the facility’s roof, but two dozen of the company’s trucks are already using the charging points in the parking lot. The 180-kilovolt (which equals 1,000 volts) fast chargers can fully recharge a truck in three to four hours.

This first-of-a-kind pilot is remarkable in that it has brought “speed to power,” going from contracting to charging in 13 months. It meets the food distribution company’s need to charge when they need to, provides resilient backup and load flexibility, and provides a price hedge at a time of record-high diesel prices.

“Our solutions are only becoming more valuable as cost, reliability and power availability worsens,” Weir said.

According to O’Brien, truCurrent has plans to deploy microgrids nationwide, using a system of turnkey installations where the infrastructure is owned and operated by the local company or the community, but the planning, procurement and installation is provided by truCurrent.

“This project was driven by regulatory pressures in California, the company’s sustainability targets, and the increasing economic benefits with updated analysis, showing lower operating costs for electric fleets compared to diesel (pre-Iran war calculations),” O’Brien said.

The truCurrent project is for transportation usage, but there is a growing demand for microgrid deployment in suburbs and even in apartment complexes.

It is an example of Weir’s vision for the electrical grid of the future, which, in addition to liquidity and speed, must be designed for abundance and affordability.

The project “turned every challenge into an advantage for the developer, the customer, the utility and capital markets,” Weir said.

Shared prosperity with a microgrid: What’s not to like?

The Glass Tower Life of the Super-Rich

by Leave a Comment

You and I live in houses, apartments, coops and condos, and flats. The super-rich — or is it the mega-rich or the ultra-rich? — live in “residences.” Well, they own them and sometimes they take up residence in one of their homes, so maybe the name is appropriate. In real estate speak, if it costs north of $5 million, it is a residence.

I get this not from the Oxford English Dictionary, but from the advertisements in The New York Times for living space in New York City. The city is one of a few places where the incalculably rich want to have a residence. And they shell out big bucks — bucks beyond the dreams of common avarice — to get a pad there.

Other cities where the rich feel at home are London, Monaco and Dubai. There is God Almighty-expensive real estate in Hong Kong and Mumbai (the world’s most expensive), but not all the new billionaires want to live there. They want the best of the West.

The real estate rush comes from the new billionaires. Whereas it was once the super-rich of Europe, known as Eurotrash, who sought the marble and concierge life in Manhattan towers, it is now the unfathomably rich from China, India and Russia who have ushered in a new Gilded Age with more wealth than Americans of the Gilded Age before World War I ever could have dreamed as they journeyed between Fifth or Park avenues and Newport, RI. Call them “Globotrash” — and watch them push up prices for everyone, as real estate moguls buy old buildings in Manhattan and demolish them to build luxury towers that rise higher than 90 floors.

Central London has gone, as far as ordinary Londoners are concerned. They have to commute further and further to work in the neighborhoods where they once lived. New York City is not much better: the Globotrash push out the middle class and the poor.

The skyline of Manhattan tells this new Gilded Age story: booming construction of spindly glass towers, so thin they seem even higher than their very real height.

Look in awe at 432 Park Avenue, the luxury condo which stands at 1,396 feet, slightly taller than One World Trade Center. Or the stunning new residence, One57: It rises to 90 floors with prices from a paltry $6 million for a one-bedroom to a penthouse for a god at $94 million. Now, we are talking residence.

The principal selling point for these pieces of fanciful engineering is that you get a view of Central Park. It is all, apparently about, privacy and views. Well, Central Park is nice to look at, but it is not one of the wonders of the world.

As for privacy, wait a minute. While you might want to take in the views of Manhattan as you soak in one of the grand bathrooms’ Carrara marble tubs, and then emerge in the buff to get another look at the views, for which you have paid so extravagantly, you had better watch out. I hear the paparazzi are getting camera-equipped drones. You see the park, and their cameras see you.

One57 has some of the best blue-veined marble ever quarried in Italy. In fact, there is so much of it in the building that an imaginative lawyer might be able to claim that it is a territorial extension of Italy. A part of Italy on Manhattan Island, Mamma mia!

And as the Globotrash are not known for their kitchen skills, it will be again up to the imagination of New York City to get another iconic Italian product, pizza, up there.