It's About How and Where We Build: Connecting Energy and Smart Growth

In recent years, energy issues have become a growing concern for Americans. Largely missing from present energy discussions, however, is the role that land-use practices have on energy consumption and the use of alternative energy resources. By efficiently locating development, we can reduce the amount of energy needed for transportation and for other infrastructure as compared with spread-out, suburban development. Moreover, by including greater use of energy efficient design, these "smart growth" land-use practices could become even smarter -- and better achieve their goals of environmental protection, economic prosperity, and community livability. The smart growth land-use and energy efficiency movements are intrinsically linked, yet these two fields have mostly operated in separate worlds. Greater coordination between these two professions is warranted, yet substantial barriers exist. A recent survey reveals that planners' technical knowledge of energy issues is limited, as is their inclusion of energy factors in comprehensive planning, zoning, and development review. Heightened concern about foreign oil dependence, climate change, and the other ill effects of fossil fuel usage makes the energy-land-use collaboration especially important. Recently, there have been some hopeful signs of collaboration between energy professionals and community developers

Are we still cooking with gas?

Is gas still a cheap energy to use at home? Under what circumstances should you consider switching from gas to efficient electric appliances? These are some of the questions posed and answered in this new report on the use of gas for Australian households. The aim of the national report, funded by the Consumer Advocacy Panel, is to understand the impacts of anticipated retail gas prices on households and to identify cost-effective alternatives. The new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export market from eastern Australia is pushing up retail prices for domestic gas, a situation that is expected to worsen in coming years and make gas less affordable for many people. At the same time, improvements in the efficiency of some electric appliances, particularly for space heating and hot water, now make them cheaper to run than efficient gas appliances. Among the findings, the report concluded that it was not cost-effective to connect a new home to mains gas when efficient electric appliances were an option, while in existing homes the economics of switching from gas appliances to efficient electric was best in warmer states like South Australia, Queensland and parts of NSW. In Victoria, despite the State Government’s $100 million program to roll out the gas network in regional and rural areas, the report found homes would be better off with electricity and efficient electric appliances. This major report is the first detailed research that considers the impact of future gas price rises on residential households in Australia

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Carbon Emission Policies in Key Economies

The Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to undertake a study on the ‘effective’ carbon prices that result from emissions and energy reduction policies in Australia and other key economies (the UK, USA, Germany, New Zealand, China, India, Japan and South Korea). The Commissions research report, released 9 June 2011, provides a stocktake of the large number of policy measures in the electricity generation and road transport sectors of the countries studied. And it provides estimates of the burdens associated with these policies in each country and the abatement achieved. While the results are based on a robust methodology, data limitations have meant that some estimates could only be indicative. More than 1000 carbon policy measures were identified in the nine countries studied, ranging from (limited) emissions trading schemes to policies that support particular types of abatement technology. While these disparate measures cannot be expressed as an equivalent single price on greenhouse gas emissions, all policies impose costs that someone must pay. The Commission has interpreted ‘effective’ carbon prices broadly to mean the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions — the ‘price’ of abatement achieved by particular policies. The estimated cost per unit of abatement achieved varied widely, both across programs within each country and in aggregate across countries. The relative cost effectiveness of price-based approaches is illustrated for Australia by stylised modelling that suggests that the abatement from existing policies for electricity could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost. The estimated price effects of supply-side policies have generally been modest, other than for electricity in Germany and the UK. Such price uplifts are of some relevance to assessing carbon leakage and competitiveness impacts, but are very preliminary and substantially more information would be required.carbon pricing; cost abatement; greenhouse gas emissions; abatement technology; carbon policy; energy reduction policy; emissions trading scheme; carbon leakage

System-level key performance indicators for building performance evaluation

Quantifying building energy performance through the development and use of key performance indicators (KPIs) is an essential step in achieving energy saving goals in both new and existing buildings. Current methods used to evaluate improvements, however, are not well represented at the system-level (e.g., lighting, plug-loads, HVAC, service water heating). Instead, they are typically only either measured at the whole building level (e.g., energy use intensity) or at the equipment level (e.g., chiller efficiency coefficient of performance (COP)) with limited insights for benchmarking and diagnosing deviations in performance of aggregated equipment that delivers a specific service to a building (e.g., space heating, lighting). The increasing installation of sensors and meters in buildings makes the evaluation of building performance at the system level more feasible through improved data collection. Leveraging this opportunity, this study introduces a set of system-level KPIs, which cover four major end-use systems in buildings: lighting, MELs (Miscellaneous Electric Loads, aka plug loads), HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning), and SWH (service water heating), and their eleven subsystems. The system KPIs are formulated in a new context to represent various types of performance, including energy use, peak demand, load shape, occupant thermal comfort and visual comfort, ventilation, and water use. This paper also presents a database of system KPIs using the EnergyPlus simulation results of 16 USDOE prototype commercial building models across four vintages and five climate zones. These system KPIs, although originally developed for office buildings, can be applied to other building types with some adjustment or extension. Potential applications of system KPIs for system performance benchmarking and diagnostics, code compliance, and measurement and verification are discussed

Shock to the system: dealing with falling electricity demand

This report argues that Australians are using less power but paying more for it, with potentially highly damaging consequences for the electricity system.OverviewElectricity use in Australia is falling. From the 1960s to the end of the 20th century, electricity consumption increased at an average annual rate of six per cent. Investment in power stations and electricity networks also rose steadily. Since 2009, however, eastern states’ electricity production has fallen and in Western Australia growth has plateaued since 2011.Yet this extraordinary fall in demand has not led to a fall in price, as would occur in a conventional market. Since 2006 the average household has reduced power use by more than seven per cent. But in that period the average household power bill has risen more than 85 per cent: from $890 to$1660 a year. One reason is that Australians are funding billions of dollars of infrastructure that falling consumption has made redundant. These price rises are unsustainable, but who will pay for the correction: power companies, governments or – once again – consumers?Falling consumption has several causes. Customers are responding to high prices by reducing use or switching to a new breed of more energy-efficient appliances. The cost of solar energy has fallen: a million households now have solar PV panels on their roofs. The economy has become less energy intensive as the manufacturing sector has declined.The nature of Australia’s energy market means that these changes are not leading to lower prices. Electricity generators operate in a free market: when consumption falls they must produce power at a lower price in order to sell it, or reduce production. But network businesses – which carry power from the generator to the business or home and which take about 45 per cent of a household’s electricity bill – are regulated monopolies not subject to market forces.For years, regulators have allowed these companies to earn excessive profits by setting tariffs that are too high given the low risk they face as monopolies. Some states have also allowed the companies to overinvest in infrastructure. This was less of a problem when demand was rising and higher costs were spread over a larger volume of sales. But when electricity use falls, the high cost of the network is spread over a smaller volume and customers pay more. Continually rising prices could induce them to disconnect from the network. Enough disconnections would trigger a crisis that insiders call the ‘death spiral’.To prevent this from happening governments must:Ensure that network companies make future investments that better match future power needs. Begin the hard task of reforming network tariffs so that prices companies charge reflect the costs they incur. Review the value of network assets to decide who should pay for any write-down of surplus infrastructure. These solutions are neither simple nor painless. But consumers deserve a better system. A future Grattan Institute report will produce recommendations for how that can be achieved

Secure Communication Architecture for Dynamic Energy Management in Smart Grid

open access articleSmart grid takes advantage of communication technologies for efficient energy management and utilization. It entails sacrifice from consumers in terms of reducing load during peak hours by using a dynamic energy pricing model. To enable an active participation of consumers in load management, the concept of home energy gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in the literature. However, the HEG concept is rather new, and the literature still lacks to address challenges related to data representation, seamless discovery, interoperability, security, and privacy. This paper presents the design of a communication framework that effectively copes with the interoperability and integration challenges between devices from different manufacturers. The proposed communication framework offers seamless auto-discovery and zero- con figuration-based networking between heterogeneous devices at consumer sites. It uses elliptic-curve-based security mechanism for protecting consumers' privacy and providing the best possible shield against different types of cyberattacks. Experiments in real networking environment validated that the proposed communication framework is lightweight, secure, portable with low-bandwidth requirement, and flexible to be adopted for dynamic energy management in smart grid