Bits & Watts in Motion: Our Much Better Electricity Future

Our past 150 years of experience with communication technology holds key lessons for how electricity technology could transform in the coming decades. With communications there were many decades of relative stasis in telephone technology before the transformation of the fundamental mechanism of our communication with the introduction (and wild success) of Internet technology. While physical and application layers continue to evolve, the core of IP technology has not needed to. For electricity, we have had relative stasis since the late 19th century, which raises the question of if, and when. we might see a comparable transformation.

There are many cross-references between the two systems, spanning from fundamentals like bits/watts to more global attributes such as whether control and data planes are separate or unified. There is also the central difference that data packets are all different but electrons are all the same.

This talk reviews this content and makes the case that only one mechanism for electricity can occupy the role that the Internet Protocol does for communication. That mechanism is price/quantity, supplemented by capacity management. This talk will cover how we should understand the insights from history and how apply them to technology and policy related to the electricity grid.

Speaker: Bruce Nordman, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Room: 101

Attend in person or online (see weblink for connection)