The too-smart-for-its-own-good grid
A 'heat map' depicting the rates charged by electricity producers on the Eastern seaboard and across the Midwest — in which colors at the red end of the spectrum represent high prices and colors at the blue end low prices — demonstrates how drastically the wholesale-energy market can change in as little as five minutes. | Enlarge imageImage courtesy of Mardavij Roozbehani In the last few years, electrical utilities have begun equipping their customers’ homes with new meters that have Internet connections and increased computational capacity. One envisioned application of these “smart meters” is to give customers real-time information about fluctuations in the price of electricity, which might encourage them to defer some energy-intensive tasks until supply is high or demand is low. Less of the energy produced from erratic renewable sources such as wind and solar would thus be wasted, and utilities would less frequently fire up backup generators, which...