Staff editorials
2011
The 2011 Powering a Nation staff has spent the last 10 weeks developing a project that shows the complexities of our relationship with coal. We hope that you will see how coal powers our lives and get a sense of what that means for people on different sides of the issue.
2010
Ten weeks of reporting and research have resulted in the UNC News21 team understanding U.S. energy needs to undergo sea change. Industry, government and consumers must redefine their roles, actions and relationships with one another to deliver us from the fossil fuel era.
How should we be powering our nation?
For most of the last century, our electrical grids were a symbol of progress. The inexpensive, abundant power they brought changed the way the world worked–filling homes, streets, businesses, towns and cities with energy.
But today's electrical grids reflect a time when energy was cheap, their impact on the natural environment wasn't a priority, and consumers weren't even part of the equation.
Consider what we are facing today: Cities consume 75 percent of the world's energy and emit more than 80 percent of the world's carbon dioxide; nearly 400 billion kilowatt-hours are wasted each year because of insufficient power-usage information.
As a result of inefficiencies in the system, the world's creation and distribution of electric power is now incredibly wasteful. With little or no intelligence to balance loads or monitor power flows, enough electricity is lost annually to power India, Germany and Canada.If the U.S. grid alone were 5 percent more efficient, it would be like permanently eliminating the fuel and greenhouse-gas emissions from 53 million cars. Billions of dollars are wasted generating energy that never reaches a single lightbulb.
Fortunately, our energy can be made smart. We can now instrument everything from the meter in the home to the turbines in the plants to the network itself. In fact, the intelligent utility system actually looks a lot more like the Internet than like a traditional grid.
It can be linked to thousands of power sources—including climate-friendly ones such as wind and solar. All of this instrumentation then generates new data, which advanced analytics can turn into insight, so that better decisions can be made in real time.
Our electrical grids can be a symbol of progress again—if we imbue the entire system with intelligence.
Rich Lechner oversees IBM’s efforts to help customers deal with issues and opportunities surrounding energy, the environment and sustainability.