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Energy One is a Podcast that explores the world of energy through the eyes of industry leaders, experts, and innovators.
Join us as we delve into the latest developments, trends, and challenges in the energy sector, and learn how individuals and organizations are driving progress and sustainability in this critical field.
[00:15] Welcome everyone to the Energy One podcast, the show that takes you inside a dynamic world of energy. Join us as you explore the latest trends, technologies and innovations shaping the industry today. We're here to uncover the stories that drive progress and sustainability in this critical field.
[00:28] I'm your host, Maryon Suzuki, and this is the Energy One podcast. We're starting our show off with a bang, where you had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas, and an expert in the fewest markets and renewable energy.
[00:42] With a PhD in civil engineering and a passion for sustainable solutions, Dr. Rhodes is a voice you won't definitely want to hear today. In today's episode, we delve into the intricacies of smart grids, what they are, why they're important and how they're shaping the future of energy consumption.
[00:59] We also share some of my opening insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in implementing these technologies on a larger scale. So sit back, relax, and get ready to have your mind energized, and I hope you enjoyed the show. Hello, Dr. Rhodes. Welcome on in.
[01:10] Thank you so much for joining us today. How's it going? Doing all right. How much is self? I'm doing okay to myself, Dr. Rhodes. Thank you for asking. It's a nice pleasant day outside, perfect for our episode, I would say. So let's kick things off, shall we? Sounds good.
[01:20] But why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Dr. Rhodes? Where are you from? What do you do? Yeah, so I am a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, where I study energy systems, specifically electricity sector and how it interacts with our other
[01:40] energy or not energy systems, things like natural gas or water or food or other types of sectors. So I'm a systems level engineer where I look at the big picture of how our energy systems interact with the things that power our lives today and how they may change going forward
[01:56] if we decide to clean up our energy system or things like that. So I study the whole package. See, it's quite peculiar because the energy is so involved in so many different industries nowadays, it's become such an important part of our lives.
[02:07] You can, I guess, say that it's become such an important topic over the years. It's like both the cause and the solution to so many of the problems that we face today, in fact. So Dr. Rhodes, it wasn't until later that you became interested in energy, is that right?
[02:24] You started your studies in mathematics. So I did my undergrad in mathematics and my masters in computational mathematics. I've always loved the math, but I got more interested in the things that the math could do.
[02:37] So I ended up switching over to engineering to study kind of a more practical use for the mathematics. The pure mathematics are beautiful, they're amazing, but I wanted to work on kind of more real world problems, those that have applications today and in the immediate future.
[02:51] But it was helpful with that background in mathematics and economics because that drives a lot of the decisions and things that are made from the optimization models that we run to figure out how the grid should be operated or how it should evolve to why certain technologies
[03:08] make it or not based on their economics and comparisons to others. So it was a good base long to study, but moved on to more, how do we make it work today? It comes down to the statistics, right? To see what works, what needs to be done, how can we fix things?
[03:25] Yeah, so everything from the fundamental equations of how a heat pump or air conditioner or electric vehicle works. Basically, because at the end of the day, no one really wants energy, we want the things that energy gives us, right?
[03:34] The energy services, whether or not that's from getting from point A to point B or how hard to take a shower or a cold pair to relax with. We want the thing that energy gives us, but underlying all of those systems are the math
[03:49] answers to six and everything and understanding it can help us understand why going one direction might be better than the other. Moving out to the main topic of our episode today, could you explain to us what exactly is a smart grid?
[03:58] How does it change the flow of energy and industry and how does it impact us? Yeah, so to talk about smart grid, I think it's helpful to talk about maybe what has now been termed as the dumb grid or whatever, or basically the grids that we started with.
[04:16] So what is a grid in the context we're talking about is essentially the infrastructure that is moving around things like electricity or water or gas or products or whatever it is, moving it from where it's either being produced or stored to where it's going to be consumed.
[04:29] And so when a lot of people think of the grid, the thing of the electricity grid is kind of one of the most apparent. You might see wires running down the street to your house. You may see the big transmission towers and things like that that exist or maybe you
[04:50] live next to a power plant that's making that electricity. In the past, these grids would essentially move one way. A good or service like electricity would be generated at a power plant. It would be put onto the big wires and then step down to the small wires that might run to your home or business.
[05:02] And that's generally the way that the grid worked. It was one way. There wasn't very much information about what was happening on it, but it generally worked relatively well, not as good as they do today, but it generally worked relatively well. A smart grid is an information overlay to that system.
[05:15] And so we're not only moving the good like electricity, but we're also moving information about that electricity. And that information can go both ways. We can essentially calculate the carbon intensity of electricity and we can move that along
[05:34] with the electricity and homes of businesses could decide to not consume it if it's too high or to consume it if it's dropped down like that. But given the ability of information to move quite freely, we can also have information flow from the demand side back to the supply side.
[05:47] And so when we're talking about smart grids, it's not only just moving information about how, say, the electricity is being produced, but sending price signals to those that are consuming electricity and they may want to reduce their electricity consumption or they
[06:04] may automatically sign up for the grid to turn off or turn down their use during certain time, during certain either high carbon times or high price times. And it allows a more efficient use of the resource because the supply was electricity, you have to match supply and demand in real time.
[06:21] And in the old paradigm, that was essentially supply was responding to demand. But now demand can also respond to supply. The smart grid allows that information to flow that allows that to happen. So it closes the gap between the producer and the consumer. It allows this to change information.
[06:30] That's quite important as day and age. What would you say are the main challenges that keep this technology from being applied on a murder scale today, Dr. Roots? Well, I think some of the main challenges to the smart grid are making sure that the
[06:45] data that it's producing are actionable and making sure that we have the ability to actually utilize those data because it's a lot of data. If you're, say, monitoring sub circuits within just in your given home, that may be millions
[07:00] of data points per year and then you multiply that by how many hundreds of millions there are and other types of things. It's just a lot of data. Some of it useful and some of it not. So having the ability to know what's useful, what's not and then what to do with it is,
[07:16] I think one of the biggest challenges. And there are a lot of companies that are working on that, a lot of companies in the data space kind of working on that, but I think we still have quite a long ways to go in terms of being able to be actionable kind of with that data.
[07:27] One of the things we're seeing is instead of having all of that data, say, flow back to a central repository where decisions are made and commands and stuff are sent back, is having that more edge computing, making the decisions kind of at the area where the data
[07:41] is being generated, whether that's by algorithms and things that have been built or maybe getting into things like artificial intelligence and things to try to make more data more actionable without having to move it around so much.
[07:52] So I was actually expecting that one of the biggest hurdles for smart grids would have been the cost of implementation, something that solar panels in fact encounter a lot, but it's actually a hurdle that solar panels overcame, right?
[08:06] Yeah, so I mean, things like putting solar on a building and turning a consumer into a prosumer, which is sometimes what they're called, the price of solar has dropped 90-some odd percent in the past few decades. And we have generally been moving data around for other purposes.
[08:20] I mean, you know, a lot of folks around the world have access to the internet in some form with the other. And essentially the smart grid is using similar protocols and backbones and things like that to move that information around.
[08:32] So we kind of built the smart grid backbone for other reasons, but we're able to use it for these. So you actually touched on a very interesting point. It was actually going to be our next question. That has been making a lot of waves this year in fact.
[08:45] So Dr. Rose, how do you think that AI will impact the energy industry as a whole? Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. I think a lot of industries are trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is going to impact them.
[08:59] I think one of the things that, you know, artificial intelligence can do is to really help us make sense of the large amount of data that are being generated around our energy systems. And it's not just electricity. It can be water, it can be gas, it can be, you know, everything.
[09:10] Because when we're talking about, you know, with electricity, matching supply and demand in real time, sometimes you have to make, you know, decisions in our matter of seconds or even less, sometimes if you're, say, trying to, you know, run a grid off of high levels
[09:26] of renewables, you know, you do traditionally we've had more control over generation. We have coal or natural gas or whatever we can turn the power plants up and down kind of that will. But with, you know, more things like distributed solar, utility solar, wind, you know, we are
[09:39] reliance on the meteorological conditions that drive those, you know, say we experience like a drop off in the amount of generation that we have, you know, being able to make split second decisions on, you know, what parts of our economy or parts of buildings
[09:59] or whatever are consuming electricity will need to make those decisions very quickly. And I don't think we'll necessarily have enough time to move that data around, make the decision that implemented. And so having the ability to, you know, make decisions at the edge of the network can be helpful.
[10:09] And I think artificial intelligence can help us know which, or can help us determine which of those, you know, decisions have the biggest impact and, you know, maybe can within their bounds, you know, help us be more efficient in terms of how we use energy.
[10:24] So, AI would be able to handle more than just the electricity data. It could theoretically prepare the grid for say, if you're weather upcoming storms or something of the sort, this actually, we're just to another point, Dr. Rhodes.
[10:34] Do you have made an extensive analysis of the electricity grid in Texas? And I know we're doing a lot of crystal ball questions, but what do you think the future holds for us with the current demand for energy that we see today?
[10:47] Yeah, no, I mean, I think there are a lot of, you know, levers at various, in the US, at various state levels, the federal level and kind of at the, you know, federal level, or the country level large across the globe, of wanting to, you know, move to cleaner
[11:04] energy sources, right? So things like wind, things like solar, there's been also been a revival in things like, you know, nuclear and geothermal, those sources of energy that don't produce any carbon emissions when generating electricity, but also kind of have an on and off switch,
[11:15] which can be helpful in terms of, you know, managing large levels of demand in systems where we've incorporated a lot of renewable energy. So we're seeing a large, you know, drive for cleaner sources of energy, those cleaner sources
[11:31] of energy are going to need a grid that is different than the one we built in the past. The past grid has been built for, you know, demand scenarios and climates of, you know, the last century, whereas we're going to have to build this system for our new climate
[11:45] paradigm and new levels of demand because we're not only, you know, trying to increase generation from clean sources, we're trying to use electricity for more things. We are, you know, electrifying transportation.
[12:01] So that is a new, you know, demand that we haven't seen in the past and our, you know, grid wasn't necessarily built for. We're trying to electrify things like building heat and that's, you know, another demand that we've typically met with things like fossil fuels, but if we're trying to get off
[12:15] of those, you know, we're asking a lot more of the electricity sector on both the supply and the demand side. The grid is going to look completely different in the next 25, 50 years than it has in the past.
[12:31] It's also true, everything shifting from fossil fuels into electricity puts so much more strain that the present grid isn't expecting to have or handle. In fact, in fact, if everyone moved to electric vehicles today, the grid just wouldn't be able to withstand any of that load whatsoever.
[12:43] And you actually touched on another point. I would be able to handle more than just the data coming in from the electricity grid, right? Feeding to this AI, extra data, additional data such as climate data, weather data, it could
[13:00] issue warnings to the grid, it could issue warnings to its consumers, warnings to its producers. And speaking of whether we should put the crystal ball away for a moment, let's bring your conversation to the recent past and even the present, Dr. Rhodes.
[13:12] Texas remembers very well the Winter Parallel losses of 2021 and even recently we have the devastating Maui wildfires in Hawaii. What exactly happened here and what can we do to avoid something like this in the future?
[13:31] I think a lot of these issues from fires in California and Hawaii to winter storms taking out large swaths of southern grids are just we built our infrastructure to exist in a certain climate and that climate is changing.
[13:47] And so our infrastructure, whether that's grids or roads or whatever it is, are going to have to evolve to handle our new future. And we are also demanding that these systems be more robust at the same time. We're demanding that the grid be reliable, be up 99.999% of the time.
[13:59] And that means we need redundancies built in the system. That means we need to take into account kind of what the future looks like. If you look across multiple states in the US, they're still making decisions about
[14:15] what infrastructure is going to get built without considering that the climate will be different than it has been in the past. And so a lot of times we're setting ourselves up for failure in the future if we're not taking into account a better feel of what that future might look like.
[14:27] One of the things that artificial intelligence hopefully also could help us with are things like predictive maintenance on this infrastructure. PG&E missing that hook on the transmission tower that led to them starting fires in California.
[14:46] If we had better information about maintenance and we know the impact of things like what these high winds are doing to our infrastructure, we could better predict, be more efficient with sending crews out to visually inspect and look at this type of infrastructure or just
[15:02] knowing when our infrastructure is being asked to work in bounds outside of which it was created to do and leading to things like maybe having public safety power shut offs that California does in other places as well.
[15:16] It's unclear exactly which direction we're going to go, but I think high levels of data and even artificial intelligence are going to be helpful there. Hopefully we'll be seeing that sooner rather than later considering how severe the weather has been growing right. Absolutely.
[15:25] So Dr. Rhodes, let's widen the focus of our discussion a little bit. In the broader field of energy, are there any interesting projects or new technologies that you are currently exploring or that you'd like to share with us?
[15:44] Yeah, so I think one of the things that has become a lot more interesting as of recent given the federal legislation in the US is what the future of low carbon hydrogen looks like. Because I do think there are some parts of our energy system that are going to be hard to electrify.
[15:56] Things like very heavy duty transport, air transport, steel production, some heavy industrial uses are going to be hard to electrify. We're still probably going to need to, for lack of a better term, burn some things.
[16:12] But if we're able to do that with cleaner fuels like hydrogen, we can get the same intense heat and flames and things like that without the CO2 emissions associated with them. The US government is offering very generous tax credits when it comes to the production
[16:28] of green hydrogen and we are seeing a large movement of companies looking to get into that space, not only for hydrogen usage in the US, but also potentially the US becoming a major exporter of hydrogen or hydrogen carriers to places like Europe, or Asia.
[16:44] And so I think that's a really interesting space to be watching because there's a lot of demand now and in the future and I think it can make a really big difference. That's awesome. I hope we get to see that being applied some time soon. I think we covered a bit of ground today, Dr. Rhodes.
[16:57] Before we finish the episode, we always ask our guests for some tips and recommendations that maybe use for its raw audience. So do you have any recommendations for books, movies, maybe even shows? Yeah, so getting a better feel for how our climate may be impacting our infrastructure,
[17:18] I think a great book, California Burning by Katherine Muntn in the Wall Street Journal is a great book to read that looks like not only just the California impacts, but kind of the things that can be taken writ large from that. At the same time, it's also hard to build infrastructure.
[17:33] There's a book by Russell Gold called Superpower that kind of follows the saga of trying to build a large transmission line and how it wasn't able to happen, how it failed. A transmission line that would have burned on a lot more development of wind and created
[17:47] a lot of renewable energy, but just because it has positive impacts doesn't mean that our infrastructure always gets built. And so just the saga of nuts and bolts, I kind of how that works. I think those two books are great. All right, awesome.
[17:58] And what about advice for folks that are just getting started in this crazy world of energy? Yeah, so the energy space is big, but it's growing, and I don't think we're going to use less energy in the future. I think we're going to continue to use more.
[18:08] And so I think it's going to be a good growth sector for sure. So there's a vice I give to students, which is, you know, study the hardest thing that you like, because it opens up the most doors for those getting into the energy space.
[18:23] I would say if you want to make yourself indispensable, become an expert on something that not that many people are experts on and you'll get, you know, called upon for that. There's a lot of people who just want to be big, high level picture energy folks, which
[18:41] is great, but that is a crowded space, but becoming an expert on something that not many people know about the intricacies of how the grids work and things like that, I think is going to be in high demand going forward. Wonderful. That's some valuable piece of advice.
[18:51] We're at the end of our episode today. I think this is a good point to wrap things up. So once again, Dr. Rhodes, thank you so much for your time on our show today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. How can our listeners reach out to you?
[19:08] So I'm easiest found on Twitter or I guess X, Josh D.R. 83, yes, or through LinkedIn, and also on those. So yeah. Perfect. And to our listeners, if you have any questions for us or our guests, we have all the links and contact information in our show notes. I guess that's all we have today.
[19:22] Thank you so much for listening. Until next time. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Energy One podcast. Stay connected and join a conversation. Reach out to us at info@energyonepodcast.com. Join us next time as we keep exploring this industry and the brilliant minds that make
[19:25] it all possible.