Best of: How the grid is becoming more human-centric

0:00Hey everyone, it's your host Russ Altman from the Future of Everything. We're in the midst of summer and we know that power outages can happen more frequently during this season due to higher temperatures and increased demand for electricity. A couple of years ago, I sat down with Ram Rajagopal, an expert in the future of electrical power. He shared a few ways our existing system of massive power plants is slowly but surely giving away to a much leaner, decentralized system of small-scale power generation. Rahm refers to this as a move from an infrastructure-centric model to a human-centric grid, one that will be much smarter, more inclusive, and better able to adapt to the needs of individual users.

0:43It's a topic that impacts all of us, and I hope you'll tune in again for a refresher on how the electric grid works and how it's evolving. Before we get started, another reminder to rate and review the show, particularly if you found it useful or have learned something new.

1:06The current power grid is really a relic, you might say, from the late 19th century. At that time, the model was to have large power plants generating electricity, putting it out as far as they could with big wires that brought the power to the surrounding areas. Eventually, of course, there was a grid of these power plants so that they could have some cooperation to kind of meet the needs of a region based on perhaps uneven demand or catastrophic breakdowns. In fact, I am old enough to remember the loss of power in the Northeast. It was called the blackout on November 9th, 1965. I was a toddler in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm told by my mother that I was watching television.

1:53And then, of course, the television went out, the signal went out, and I had a temper tantrum because I couldn't watch television. Of course, all the lights and all the rest of the power in New York City was lost, as well as surrounding areas in the Northeast. This all happened about 530 in the afternoon. Because of that, there were subway cars with commuters that were stopped under the East River, and there was danger to many folks, especially in critical businesses like the hospitals and whatnot. The blackout, it turned out, was caused by a cascade of safety shutdowns because of increased loads on this November day that was evidently quite chilly.

2:33And of course, blackouts continue to this day, micro, just your block or your state. In California, we have them because of fires, both to prevent the fires and because of the fires. In other areas, there are weather disruptions. And of course, these disruptions can be dangerous as they impact emergency services, hospitals. But there's a new vision for how power will be distributed. It probably will be much more from diverse sources, wind, solar, water. Of course, we will continue to have large generators. And there will be better capabilities for storing these unused energy sources so that we can use them when we need them in next generation batteries.

3:16We will still, however, need to connect our buildings to the power grid, and there will be new intelligent systems that help us manage, predict, and respond to energy usage within the home, town, city, state, and country. Professor Ram Rajagopal is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and electrical engineering at Stanford University, where he's also a fellow at the Precourt Institute of Energy. His laboratory studies the economic risks of the power grid and how they can be mitigated. Ram, you have a project and a vision called PowerNet. Sounds great. What is PowerNet and how is it inventing the future for how we're going to use electricity?

3:59Ram Rajagopal:This is a great question, Russ. Thank you for having me. And I love your show, by the way. Thank you. So the first principle here is, you know, traditionally the way we designed the grid is what you can call infrastructure centric. We looked at cities and regions, we calculated how much demand each one will have and we designed against it. We didn't really know and were not able to measure who are these individuals, how are we going to supply the different and varying needs across businesses and people and people that might be vulnerable and so on. I think we're going into a world where we call it more of a human-centered grid, where the grid is designed around the necessities of each individual.

4:52Ram Rajagopal:And in this human-centered grid, every individual can be both a consumer of power and a supplier of power. And so what was the idea behind PowerNet was to think about how to interconnect all of these consumers or prosumers together so that they can optimize themselves, but also coordinate across to offer services back to the grid. So in traditional power systems, your consumption is what's called behind the meter consumption because the power system only saw you as that meter. Everything that happens in my house gets summarized how fast that little dial spins. That little dial, exactly. And they don't even know what's happening in your house, whether you have this capability or that capability.

5:46Ram Rajagopal:In these future power systems, future grid, behind the meter, we'll have a lot of intelligence and capability. And we have to be able to utilize it to really balance out all the uncertainty and variability in the renewables. You can't just think of adding a lot of backup power for the moments where there's a cloud or the wind is changing. you really need to figure out how to do move from. I think the way this is thought about is I just, I'm going to set as much supply as there is demand. So supply follows demand. Yep. Do something where both meet in the middle. So, yeah. So that's a really interesting idea.

6:32I want to revisit the degree to which it's not human centered right now, because I think that will help us understand how it could become. So is it essentially this idea that there's a meter and that to the power company, my family is the rate at which that meter goes? Do they look at when I'm using and when I'm not using? And do they make decisions based on that? Or is it just averaged over the month and then that's it?

7:01Ram Rajagopal:They might make decisions over specific hours of the day, very rarely. but they don't really have in an extensive way, a way to engage with your flexibility. What do I mean by this? If you saw what happened in Texas, for example, people were cut off power. And in certain regions, people still had power. In others, they were completely cut off. And you could think maybe there was a way in which what if we all cut off non-essentials and then maybe something essential as eating is preserved in some fashion. That requires a much more granular engagement. It is even beyond, it's like going behind the meter and understanding what your needs are, what your, you know, how you value those needs and how to compensate you and engage you for the capabilities that you might have.

7:58Yeah, so you've written about, as part of the PowerNet vision, you've written about something called like a home, I think it was called the smart dimmer, where actually, as you said, behind my meter, there are decisions being made about maybe now is not the best time to do my laundry or to use the dryer, or maybe I should wait till later to charge my electrical car. So that raises a lot of issues because as you're, so first of all, I want to make sure I got that right. Is that the idea behind the kind of the system that might be running in homes in the future?

8:30Ram Rajagopal:Yeah, that's one part of it for sure, is this idea that you can enable using power electronics or a smart dimmer, the control of things in your home. Yes. But that raises the issue about privacy. And I know that you've written and talked about this, and I actually thought we would get to this at the end of our conversation, but I think it comes up right away. The nice thing about having a meter and then nothing after that is I can use my electricity, I can do whatever I want. And I don't have to worry about anybody kind of dipping into my life to figure out what I'm doing and to reverse engineer.

9:06Oh, he's spending a lot of time, you know, on a computer interviewing people. I wonder what, you know, I wonder why. So am I being paranoid or are there real issues in having electronic systems that look a little deeper into the home at electrical usage? And how do we make sure that people feel comfortable with that?

9:26Ram Rajagopal:So let me answer this in two ways. One, you're not going to be very happy about, which is with the data that you get from meters, particularly if you can get minute by minute measurements, which many meters allow you to do that. Yes. People have shown using machine learning, they can kind of infer what you're doing in your home. Is that right? That is right. So is it that the different kinds of appliances have different electrical signatures? And if you look at the detailed, you say, oh, that's a TV, that's a stereo system, that's a printer. It is. And then you can kind of combine those to figure it out like, oh, this is on and that is on.

10:03Ram Rajagopal:And so I know you're doing this activity, right? Very. Okay. So that's good for me to know. It already could be possible. It already could be possible. But this issue of privacy is very critical. And one of the ways in which I think this is going to happen is what we were trying to show with PowerNet where there is an amount of local intelligence. So a lot of the coordination could be happening in a computer in your home that you have full control with on that computer. And then there's kind of an interface where you could send the information you think is appropriate for the services that you want to provide.

10:40Ram Rajagopal:So if you want to participate in reducing the peak during a particular time because you think it's profitable for your home, then that amount of information can be shared. And that's what we do in PowerNet. We don't really ask you to submit all of the information that's local to you, only some type of very aggregate information for the purposes of calculating how much of your capacity to be flexible you're going to use. And then when you say submit, do you mean submit it to the utility for their planning purposes? It could be aggregators. I think in the future, we're going to see more emphasis on a variety of other actors beyond the utility that try to coordinate these resources.

11:28Ram Rajagopal:So Tesla could be an aggregator, for example. So you might you don't want to tell them exactly what you're doing, but you might say, look, this is the flexibility I have for these hours. And then they say, I want to use this much flexibility. And your local brain is kind of calculating how you do that, but it's all local and it takes into account your preferences and so on. Right. Okay, so good. So now you're starting to paint a picture that I actually might be much more involved in decision making about my electrical usage in my home or in my building if I'm a company. But I guess the unstated assumption here is I will be motivated to do that engagement for at least two reasons.

12:10One is because I want to be a good citizen and I want to help the world use energy efficiently. Let's say that there's a subset of people who care about that. The other one will be money. And almost everybody I know cares about money, which is that how much does it cost me and will this help my bill? So there will be a certain amount of retraining of the consumer to be much more thoughtful, at least potentially, about their usage. That almost becomes a human engineering or a social engineering. Is that something that your group kind of moves into? Yeah, we collaborate with social scientists in studying this issue of how do we communicate effectively this idea of flexibility and what actions you need to do.

12:56Ram Rajagopal:What we found in practice, obviously things that are fully automated and transparent to you, like a battery, you don't feel anything, they work great. As soon as I have to account for your preferences, the changes, communicating that becomes very important. We have a project with Hilary Boudet in Oregon State and Dr. June Flora, who is in the medical school here at Stanford, looking at this issue of can we help people understand their energy consumption? And what Hillary and June found is amazing is that the first thing is actually by working with kids and teaching them how to do a little bit of understanding of data, data science.

13:46Ram Rajagopal:Yeah, they can look at their consumption shapes and understand what's the meaning of a shape. And then they learn how to do data science using their own energy data. and they learned this concept of like changing your lifestyle and energy. I definitely wanted to ask you about this because I was looking at your papers and you had a paper on, I think it was called tweens, which are the children who are right before teenager, like I guess 10, 11, 12. Is this the group that you're referring to? Yes. So in this program, Hillary and June have been training hundreds of tweens, several hundreds every year.

14:25Ram Rajagopal:There's a cohort from high schools and middle schools in the area that are trained into data science through reading their own data of energy. And then they make a plan for their home and teach their parents about how to be more flexible. And then they can see the effects on their meter data. This is the future of everything. I'm Russ Altman. I'm speaking with Ram Rajagopal. And we're now talking about the human aspects of the electric power grid. And this is a great example, because then if you can get this generation to think of this as a normal activity, then when they're homeowners and business owners, that'll be part of their routine is like, let's look at our graphs and let's figure out if there's an opportunity to save money or save the environment.

15:14Ram Rajagopal:And Russ, I think the biggest thing that I see whenever I participate in these events with our kids and so on is that they are fascinated by this idea that the grid links us all together. So what you do doesn't matter just to you. It matters to everyone. And it has an environmental impact through the timing of your energy use causes different amounts of emissions. and that causes different types of health damages and preventing that. It becomes a kind of a passion to optimize, change how you use energy. So I think that is a big part of the equation is behavior and understanding that behavior. Equally, I think is this issue of, we can't depend on behavior alone if we want to scale up the grid to something where we say 100 % renewables, right?

16:09Ram Rajagopal:So you have to have some degree of automation in the homes and technologies that are implemented in that way. So let's go a little bit deeper into that. So what kind of automation can you imagine and have you prototyped that we don't have currently that could make a big difference? I think one level of automation is this local intelligence ability to kind of learn the behavior of the loads from the local data, like when you turn on things and so on. and it can make slight changes on the power profiles. So you still get the same service, but during the window in which you're expecting it to happen, it can spread things out, like your water heater.

16:56Ram Rajagopal:I can heat the water a little bit more now. When you're going to use it in your shower, you're still going to, because there's a temperature, like a mixing of cold and hot water, you're still going to get it as you want. But the advantage is a little later, you know, when power is more expensive, your water is already hot so i don't heat it then so you can preheat and store so that's one aspect of it i think the other kind of important aspect which which we don't see a lot today but i'm hoping to see in the future is to think of energy use as part of health we don't do that yet we have investigated about it for example if you go out for a walk at 6 p.m or 7 p.m.

17:41Ram Rajagopal:It's very helpful for the grid because if you turn off everything in your home that you can turn off, that's exactly the point where we have like the power peaks happening right now. So as you start to link the way you live and kind of the necessity of the system, that can become another powerful way to do this. This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman. More with our guest, Professor Ram Rajakopal, next.

18:18Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman. I'm speaking with Ram Rajagopal about energy, the power grid, and the future of the power grid. And I did want to talk about the fact that in my opening comments, I was talking about these big power plant that generate electricity, put it out on big wires. That was where all the electricity came from that power point, but we're now looking at water and air and all of those other renewables. It seems that that's therefore likely to change the entire infrastructure of electrical generation and distribution. And I'm wondering, what is that going to look like?

18:52And what have you been able to kind of figure out about how to manage that going forward?

18:57Ram Rajagopal:The main changes are, of course, renewables and storage coming online at a transmission scale. That's a big change. but also this idea that now consumers can produce and be more flexible. But that demands a lot more sensing. We need to be able to measure things better. It demands a lot more reliability of our local power networks. Our distribution networks today are barely monitored. You would have to make sure those are much more reliable and monitored. this also will require some different ways to for consumers to engage through marketplaces that happen at different timescales all that are much more dynamic so i expect in the future the grid to be far more autonomous having a lot more sensors and and controls i just want to make sure i understand the reason sensors are important is for the purposes of audit so you know who made the electricity, who used it, and are there any breakdowns?

20:05I just want to make sure I understand why sensing becomes more important.

20:09Ram Rajagopal:Because in real time, not just audits, you also have to make sure that the amount of power that's flowing through the lines meets the capacity of the lines, the transformers are not being overloaded. So operational constraints are all met. Okay. Okay. It's like making sure you're steering things correctly, like in your car. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So we'll have a much more distributed system with this sensing and let me let you continue. Yeah. And I think one of the things that you will start to see is this kind of combination of sensing and control and autonomy really becoming far more prevalent than it is today.

20:48Ram Rajagopal:It is prevalent right now, if you think about the big generators, they're mostly autonomous. They have a lot of autonomous capabilities, but this will spread over to our homes and businesses. And one of my favorite examples is, you know, in PowerNet, we went and looked at ventilation in a dairy production farm here in California, the Double Diamond Dairy Farm. It's the largest dairy farm here. And what we did is we actually added intelligence to every fan in this barn that cools the cows. You said it cools the cows. I didn't know that was a thing. It is a big thing, actually. It consumes a lot of power.

21:35Ram Rajagopal:You know, in a single barn, you have in excess of a megawatt of power being consumed to cool cows. Okay. And you have typically 10 barns like that in a farm. And what we did is now you're trying to manage that cooling by taking into account weather conditions like wind. So we had sensors for that. We also measure the temperature of the animal itself using thermal cameras. And then there's an intelligence that's kind of managing all of that. That enabled us to reduce the power, you know, the bills by 80 % and the dependency on the grid by another nearly 90%. Well, so they must have loved you. Yeah, they loved it.

22:17Ram Rajagopal:They thought it was some kind of gimmick. And then they showed it. And, you know, it makes power far more reliable. gives a lot more controls. So I started seeing all the problems we have in this rural United States and the grid as something we should be able to address right now. And it's a great test bed for a lot of these ideas. Now, in the case of this dairy, did they also produce some electricity through solar or whatever? Yeah, they added solar on the barn and they had a big solar facility for the rest of their. So this is like a little preview of what every home and business might be doing in the future is you look at your usage, you do some generation, it may or may not be enough, you may sell some back to the grid, or you may need more.

23:04But then you said 80 % reduction in their usage, based on basically smart fans.

23:11Ram Rajagopal:Smart fans plus storage locally. yes and uh and the added benefit is uh better management of the animal health because it was not even accounted for before now you can even target the fans you know which ones to turn on and off which is that's right because you were you were sensing the temperature of the animals and presumably there's a target temperature and if one of the animals is getting too warm then the smart system says okay we got to cool off you know bluebell bluebell the cow needs to be Okay, so that's really a great, vivid. Let me ask, how did you ever start that collaboration? So I'm just imagining I'm a dairy farmer, I got a lot of problems, and then a professor of civil and environmental engineering from Stanford calls me up.

23:56How did that happen?

23:58Ram Rajagopal:That happened because we, through the federal government, you know, this was funded through the DOE. We have events. In one of these events, we met a company that made these fan controllers. And they said, wow, your intelligence thing is great. And you're doing all these homes, which is super hard because each unit in a home, each thing you do is so small. Right, right. Can you apply this to fans? And I thought, okay, maybe this is some kind of industrial fans on a factory. We were surprised when he came and met with us and said, no, it's actually farms. And then we had an amazing group of students that has been leading the project who go to the farm, became friends with the farmer.

24:44Ram Rajagopal:Yes. It's a big deal. You know, one of these fans fails. You know, he's. You could lose a cow. You can lose a cow. And that's like, you know, their profit margins are razor thin. So it was a gigantic issue to like get them to trust you. So at first we just measured. Right. No, this is a great it's a great story. And of course, as you describe it, I'm thinking stadiums and hospitals. You've mentioned health a couple of times. And of course, ventilation is on everybody's mind during the COVID pandemic, where the question is, how much can we open up the restaurants? I know that people even worry if I have a restaurant, can I have three sides closed with one side open or can I open up to do I have to open two or three sides in order to get ventilation?

25:28So you can imagine that in the setting of any big facility when they have choices on what to turn on for ventilation, it could be direct health benefits.