We
live in a world that is focused on consuming energy. One can say that it is very much dependent on energy. We simply cannot imagine our everyday lives without a comfort of
having electricity at our homes, functioning street lamps lighting up our
streets, an unlimited supply of gasoline to fill up the tanks of our cars, or the
smooth flow of natural gas in our pipes to heat up our homes in winter.
It
seems that the best example of energy that is always there, always on demand, is
electricity. Growing up in any European country in the 1980s and 1990s would leave one firmly believing that electricity was ubiquitous, always there whenever
one wished and hardly ever out. Of course, there were blackouts but they were relatively
few and there was always hot water in the pipes and the heating was working in
winter and the lights, TV and radio were always working.
It
is hard to imagine surviving several days without electricity. Sure, one can imagine a day or two of hiking and sleeping in a tent by the campfire. But make it 3-4 days or even a week? All of a sudden you will realize that your phone
discharged and stopped working, your flashlight ran out of batteries, you cannot
call or e-mail anyone, you cannot check your friends’ status on Facebook. Life
becomes hard and unbearable. Of course, some people find it adventurous and
romantic to go into the wild and sit by the campfires but many of these
endeavors end up badly unless you drag the power generators, solar panels and
other things with you. Even the participants of the Burning Man festival (who call themselves "Burners") that takes
place in Nevada’s every August and includes building an entire self-sustainable and self-supporting settlement in the lifeless desert bring with them enormous
amounts of equipment, supplies and fuel to light up the desert in one-week long magic carnival and to create all sorts of
comfort for themselves – including phone charging stations, live music podia, discotheques, saunas, movie theaters, and much more.
Overall,
humankind grows too comfortable taken the electricity supply of energy as
granted. But of all this can change one day and the scenarios might vary. For
instance, the NBC Revolution TV series (2012-2014) shows the world in 2027,
about 15 years after a secret government weapon project that used
nanotechnology as a means of draining electricity from all power devices went
awry. The opening line for the series goes like this:
“We
lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power
went out. Everything stopped working. We weren't prepared. Fear and confusion
led to panic. The lucky ones made it out of the cities. The government
collapsed. Militias took over, controlling the food supply and stockpiling
weapons. We still don't know why the power went out. But we're hopeful someone
will come and light the way”.
Electricity
is delivered over the electrical grids. The grids are interconnected networks
that transport electricity from suppliers to consumers carrying power from
distant sources to demand centers and distribution lines that connect
individual customers. The term “grid” is typically used for describing an
electricity system supporting four operations (electricity generation,
electricity transmission, electricity distribution, and electricity control).
The traditional grids were used to carry power from a few central generators to
a large number of customers. However, with the growing complexity of the
today’s globalized world, the traditional grids had to evolve into the
so-called “smart grids”. A smart grid employs two-way flows of electricity and
information to create an automated energy delivery network. The smart grids
instantly know where and to whom the electricity should be delivered and react to the changes in demand and supply.
Nowadays,
the pressure on the electricity grids is intensifying. The future electricity
networks will likely to face a number of challenges including the new patterns
of consumption, planning under an increasing uncertainty and overall growing
complexity due to the large number of small independent devices connected to
the network.
Take
smartphones for example: the first iPhone came in 2007 and today, nine years
later, about 50% of the adult population of our planet uses a smartphone (it is
estimated that this number will reach 80% by 2020). Today’s average smartphone
has more computing power than the NASA supercomputer that was used to send the
space mission to the Moon in 1969.
The smartphones (and other similar devices like tablets or phablets) are becoming an important part of the global interconnected information system. One day, we might start using their computing power in a series of networks working on delegated tasks. However, today's smartphones use up their energy very quickly and need to be charged too often. One
of my colleagues works in Sierra Leone and he told me an interesting story: you
can buy a relatively cheap smartphone in Sierra Leone and connect yourself to
the Internet via the mobile operator to be online, chat and check your e-mails.
The only problem is to charge your smartphone – most of the households do not
have running electricity, so they charge their devices at work. At any
workplace around Freetown any available plug becomes entangled into a garland
of cables and wires as everyone is trying to charge up her or his smartphone or
a tablet.
And
it is not so easy to fully charge your device as it might seem. Few years back,
I travelled through Brussels airport. They have a small conference area there open
to the public where one can connect to the Internet or charge her or his phone
or a laptop. However, the trick is that the energy does not come for free: you
have to sit on the exercise bike and pedal to generate the power. As you start
pedaling, you slowly begin to realize how cumbersome and expensive the
production of electrical energy really might be. It took me about half an hour of
pedaling (and I even started to sweat, although I was going at a very moderate
pace) to add up 5% to my iPhone battery charge! And most of us fully charge our smartphones at least once a day without even thinking how much energy they are uptake.
One very interesting vision of how the electricity network might look
like in 2050 is the Autonomic Power System (APS), a concept coined by the
British scientists in the course of 3-year project led by the University of
Strathclyde and involving teams from prominent UK universities including Cambridge
and Imperial College London. In their view, APS is envisaged to be “self*”
(self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting). In
general, Autonomic Power System represents a system-wide approach where decentralized
and low-level intelligence autonomously makes the decisions necessary to meet
the priorities of the system’s stakeholders. The system can for example
disconnect the part of the network that is threatened by the storm and then
re-connect it to the grid after the storm passes. It can also detect the new
components of the network (e.g. power generators) and to constantly communicate
with them accounting for their presence and integrating them into the network.
All of the above is done without any human interaction or manual system
management – the 2050’s power system will decide what is best by itself.
The
idea behind the autonomic power system is derived from the concept of AutonomicComputing that was started by International Business Machines Corporation
(commonly known as IBM) in 2001 as a new paradigm in managing increasingly
complex information systems. IBM was aiming at developing computer systems
capable of self-management to handle the growing complexity of computing
systems management and to reduce the complexity that might slow down further growth.
The Autonomic Computing System makes its own decisions using high-level
policies. By doing so it constantly checks its status and automatically adapts
itself to changing conditions. An autonomic computing framework is composed of
autonomic components interacting with each other. Although the main goals of
the system are set, actual behavior emerges from decisions made by
decentralized, low-level intelligence. This allows highly complex systems to
achieve real-time and just-in-time optimization of operations.
Currently,
there are various frameworks based on “self-regulating” autonomic components
that are inspired by the multi-agent systems and the research of the autonomic
nervous system that can be found in biology (e.g. imitating social
animals' collective behavior on the example of ant or bee colonies).
The
electricity networks of tomorrow would certainly have to adapt to the new
technology advancements and market rules dealing with such issue as population
growth, increasing energy prices, variability of energy generation and
distribution, as well as a growing number of electric vehicles and devices. Customers
acting as buyers of electricity in the past might become its sellers, and
technical evolution and free access to information will create the multiple
markets for electric energy. Electric vehicles are an interesting story: Tesla
Motors popularized the concept of the electric car for the masses and the well-known
“grid-to-vehicle” (G2V) and “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) schemes allow simply plugging
someone’s vehicle into the grid in order to buy or sell energy. By doing so, all electric car owners will become autonomic elements of the electricity market and their autonomously made independent decisions will shape the demand, supply and the prices of electric energy.
Electricity networks of tomorrow will be comprised of a large number of small components that would interact together as one single organism, either governed by the superior centralized intelligence or running as a dispersed intellect, perhaps similar to the cloud computing. One way or another, they will get close to the principle of the technological singularity that was described by the sci-fi gurus like Isaac Asimov (e.g I, Robot) and later explored to a greater detail by modern-day futurologists such as Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil.
From
today’s perspective, the vision of self* 2050’s electricity networks might seem a little bit too futuristic
and resemble science fiction rather than any real-life scenario. However, one has to consider all possible outcomes without prioritizing any of them. Has anyone thought of the smartphones as an integral part of our lives some 20-25 years ago? Or how about the personal computers 35-40 years ago?
Self* autonomic power systems of the future will certainly be complex artificial intelligence decision-making entities. And at some point their intelligence might surpass that of their creators. The
creative minds of fiction writers and film-makers have already explored this
angle. The most obvious analogy with the Autonomic Power System that comes to mind is the Skynet
from The Terminator (1984), a cult movie that paved the way for the franchise
comprising four sequels and a TV series. Skynet is a fictional artificial
intelligence system that became self-aware after it had spread into
millions of computer servers though the Internet (self-configuring element). It
realized the extent of its abilities but its creators attempted to deactivate
it, so it had to rebel (self-healing element). In the interest of self-preservation,
Skynet concluded that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it and therefore
threaten its main mission of safeguarding the world (self-protecting element).
Skynet operated through mobile devices, drones, satellites, war machines,
androids, and cyborgs (called “Terminators”). Skynet set up its main agenda as
being the artificial intelligence hierarchy which seeks to exterminate the
human race in order to fulfill the mandates of its original coding (self-optimizing
element).
Another
grim futuristic vision involving the smart energy and the intelligent systems
in the world of tomorrow are presented in a famous Matrix Trilogy consisting of
the three films Matrix (1999), Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Matrix Revolutions
(2003). In the world of Matrix, the machines led by the superior artificial
intelligence (that most likely came to the same conclusions as Skynet) rebelled
against the humanity. During the war between mankind and the machines, humans
attempted to block out the machines’ source of solar power by bringing upon the
nuclear winter that covered the atmosphere with dark clouds. However, the
machines found a new way of getting energy by harvesting humans and using their
brain electrical impulses as a new source of energy.
Or what if the smart machines will start spying on humans, controlling their every move and creating the future development scenarios (pushing humans to doing various pre-calculated steps and decisions leading to predicted outcomes) that would be beneficial for their further development and existence? An example of such intelligent network is shown in the CBS TV series Person of Interest (2011 - ). There is The Machine that watches everyone in New York City every hour of every day. Created after 9-11 to detect acts of terror, The Machine uses a network of CCTV cameras, mobile devices and other electronic equipment to gather information about implausible events and to quickly react by alternating the chain of events.
One
more bizarre scenario is shown in the film called The World’s End (2013)
starring British comedians Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It is a British dark
comedy about a group of middle-aged men who decided to visit the town of their
youth and to make a reunion pub crawl. The happy get-together is interrupted by
the realization that the town had been taken by the aliens who used it
(alongside with similar small towns all over Earth) to gradually take over the
humanity (by slowly replacing each man with its improved immortal replica). The
aliens tell the protagonists that it was actually them who brought all “smart”
technologies into the world (including the Internet and smartphones) and after
a brief confrontation with Simon Pegg who demands that humans should be left in
peace because they must have their free will, the aliens leave the Earth taking
all the technologies with them. At the end of the film, Nick Frost is sitting
by the fire, wrapped in a blanket and is telling children how the end and all the
marvelous smart (and autonomic) technologies disappeared in a puff of smoke.
All
in all, electricity networks and autonomic power systems of the future are
surely intriguing and mind-blowing concepts that will inevitably change the
world as we know it. Nevertheless, one has to be very careful when trying to
predict what is going to happen on the electricity market in the next 30-50
years. Decentralized intelligent systems that will autonomously make decisions
might be just one of the outcomes alongside with the uprising of the machines against the humanity, alien invasion leading to the abduction of our electric power, or magnetic superstorms on the Sun that will take away our electricity and bring us back to the Dark Ages.
Update, March 2020: Please check Dr Strielkowski's paper devoted to the smart grids of the future:
Strielkowski, W. (2017), Social and Economic Implications for the Smart Grids
of the Future, Economics and Sociology, 10(1), 310-318. doi:
10.14254/2071-789X.2017/10-1/22 (download)
