Fractals of Change

Broadband for EVERYbody

We used to think it was enough to make broadband accessible everywhere. That's no longer good enough. We now need to make sure that everyone actually has broadband in his or her residence and business. Everyone! (voluntary cave dweller excepted). Our goal in Vermont is to combine stimulus money with private investment and state bonding authority to move us quickly not only to 100% broadband availability but 100% broadband penetration.

The electrical system of tomorrow, the health care system of tomorrow, and the education system of today all depend on universal broadband penetration. Oh yeah, communication, commerce, and entertainment all need broadband too. So does e-government (coming soon) and research.

The electrical system of tomorrow will be smart. That means demand, supply, capacity, and outage data flow unimpeded and in near realtime from meters to utilities and back to consumers and generators. Much of this data flow is machines communicating with other machines. Some information flow is back to consumers both large and small so they can control their energy bills by using electricity when it's abundant and cheap and shunning or selling it back to the grid when it's rare and expensive. Taking advantage of the smart grid requires a broadband connection.

Part of e-health is electronic health records. Better information means better, cheaper, and less mistake-prone care. But we can't replace paper records with electronic ones until we can be sure that very doctor's office and place of treatment is online with enough bandwidth for bandwidth-hungry objects like x-rays. In the case of home health care, the place of treatment is the home. A home health worker needs the same access to medical records and the same ability to update them that a doctor or a hospital does. The home of the future will have health monitoring devices when needed. Homes need to be online for the delivery of health care.

When I was in school a million years ago I was taught to do research in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. That was then and this is now. Students need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff on Google and wikipedia; their homework needs to be online just as mine was in the library. But a teacher can't responsibly give online homework to a class if even a small fraction of the students don't have the equipment and connections to get online when they go home. We can't reinvent pedagogy the way we need to until we know that all students have broadband connections – and that schools have scads of bandwidth

So everyone needs to be online. Geography can't be an obstacle but neither can poverty, lack of equipment, or lack of training.

The platform for SmartVermont – the Vermont we hope to build with stimulus money, State money and bonding authority, and private investment – is universal broadband penetration. The first application on that platform will be smart grid, e-health, and e-education. With lots of hard work, some luck, and our fair share of federal (our!) dollars, we can build that future for ourselves and our children.

How Elders Protect Themselves from Young’uns

"For the first two years," the young architecture student told us, "we're not allowed to use computers or CAD. We have to learn to do all our drawing by hand. That's the way Miis [van der Rohe] would have wanted it. That's how we learn the basics."

Sounds good but it's bullshit.

Do we do physics with a slide rule and log tables anymore? Would that make us more like Einstein? Do young programmers have to learn to keypunch because that's what I had to do a million years ago to prepare my programs for execution? Do stone cutters have to practice chipping a softer stone with a harder stone because that's what their predecessors did? Of course not!

I know why generation x doesn't want generation x+1 to use the latest technology; it's because the kids are better at the new technology than their elders. And the elders don't want to be bested. The great fear of the greybeards whose skill was tedious drafting of commonplace designs is that a young genius with a computer'll output a masterpiece that breaks the old rules without even serving a decent humble apprenticeship.

The rules favor the incumbents, no surprise. You can't get your degree without following some of the rules and it's hard to be a practicing architect (or many other things) without a degree. What a waste.

Synergy

Yesterday Governor Jim Douglas announced that Vermont has submitted its claim for $21,999,000.00 in stimulus money for renewable energy projects. You can read that announcement at http://recovery.vermont.gov/news/22mRenewable. This is formula money – money that Vermont is entitled to under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) so long as we can spend it quickly enough and follow all the rules. But this money is also part of our coordinated plan – SmartVermont – which aims to use stimulus money to transform the Vermont economy and assure that we are in a good competitive position for the very competitive 21^st century.

Nothing subtle about this. We intend that our use of this $22 million plus another $7 million of state funds to develop small and medium scale renewable energy projects will help convince the federal Department of Energy that we ought to receive a healthy allocation of the $4.5 BILLION which is available nationwide for smart electrical grid projects. It takes a smart grid to make full use of electricity generated from sun and wind; the smart grid is more valuable if there are a variety of energy sources for it to coordinate. Vermont already has a number of renewable energy projects up and running and in process. We estimate that we can use $29 million of ARRA and state money to bring another $150 million worth of projects online which will generate more than 3 million megawatt hours of electricity over the next twenty years ; generating this electricity from natural gas would release 860 million pounds of CO2 .

On most nights Vermont has no carbon footprint for electrical generation; our power comes from HydroQuebec and Vermont Yankee. Moreover this offpeak power is cheap at wholesale, in comes cases – believe it or not - almost free because there's no easy way to shut down its production temporarily and it has to go somewhere. On the other hand the power for peak times is generated by burning natural gas in plants that are only used for hours a day if even that. This peak power is very expensive.

In an ideal world the sun would shine on our solar collectors and the wind would turn our turbines during times of high demand and save us from buying peak power and burning hydrocarbons to produce it. Unfortunately we don't live in that ideal world; the sun shines at random and the wind blows willfully. We need a smart electrical grid to help match supply and demand.

Among the projects that Vermont utilities will almost certainly seek ARRA smart grid funding for is electricity storage – essentially big high tech batteries. These are particularly effective when used with wind power. The wind blows when it will and charges the batteries ; the grid draws from the batteries before importing fossil-fueled power.

A smart grid is good at dispatching electricity to areas of demand from areas of surplus. Even a small state like Vermont can be half cloudy and half sunny on any given day. Methane in cow power digesters can be hoarded until extra electricity is needed. Water can accumulate behind dams while the wind blows and be released on still days.

A smart grid is used to manage demand as well as supply. When there's a surplus of power, low prices encourage consumers to dry their clothes, charge up their electric vehicles and appliances, and store up heat. When power is in short supply, higher prices and information about those higher prices encourage consumers to avoid electrical consumption.

In context yesterday's announcement of incentives for distributed generation of electricity from renewable sources means that Vermont will be ready to demonstrate all of the benefits of a smart grid for energy independence and reduction of CO2. We hope the Department of Energy will see it that way when they consider our applications for smart grid projects. If they do, we'll have a smart grid sooner than otherwise and get even more value from all of our generation and transmission capacity.

That's called synergy. We should know much more about how close we come to accomplishing this plan in the next few months.

 

Is Vermont Moving Fast Enough?

My last post complained that federal agencies are not moving quickly enough to make the rules and give out the money for competitive stimulus programs in crucial areas like broadband and energy. Getting these projects under way in the this year's construction season is going to be a problem.

So how well are we doing here in Vermont at putting ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act aka the stimulus bill) money to work?

We've done a good job of getting highway projects underway. It's taken us slightly longer to sort out the priorities for water projects but we're getting there. We can't make our own rules for alternative energy and energy efficiency and some economic development programs until both houses of the Legislature and the Governor agree on a budget (hopefully'll happen by the end of this week). With hindsight I wish that I had pushed for separate legislation to get some of these projects going faster; but it's not clear whether that could've happened or even that the Legislature should have looked at a budget for ARRA money out of context of the rest of the state budget.

The Douglas Administration has proposed that large amounts of the ARRA money which has been allocated to the state by the Department of Energy be spent for alternative energy and energy efficiency projects. The intent is to distribute this money through open processes –either competitive or first come, first served for eligible projects – depending on the anticipated demand for a particular program. The idea is to make sure that the most effective projects are the ones that get done.

We can't write the precise rules for these programs until we know what the Vermont legislature finally authorizes. But we know we have to get the rules written and the awards made quickly to take as much advantage as possible of this year's summer construction season, put people to work, and quickly start reaping the long term benefits of less dependence on imported fossil fuels. You should judge us by whether we meet these goals.

We in Vermont decided to go ahead and prepare for the competitive ARRA broadband, smart grid, education, and e-health awards even in the absence of final regulations from Washington. It'll probably turn out that we've "wasted" some of this work when we see the rules under which grants are to be awarded. We rushed to be ready to file applications for broadband and smart grid grants as early as the beginning on May; looks like we didn't have to move quite that quickly. On the other hand, since we know now how we'd like to proceed in these areas, we find ourselves well-positioned to comment on both proposed regulations and the proposed (but too slow!) schedule of awards.

States have an incentive to move very quickly once ARRA money has been granted. If the money is not spent quickly, it will be reclaimed by the feds and redistributed to speedier states. Our ambition is to have Vermont benefit from these reallocations. Our small size and the important fact that we already have projects in broadband, smart grid, and health information systems underway will help; some of our permitting and review processes could be a problem. Stay tuned.