This week, we will continue our consideration of the major siting challenges in the energy enterprise by reviewing a 10-article series by NPR titled Power Hungry: Reinventing the U.S. Electric Grid. This series will give you an additional overview of the electric grid in the United States and provide you with a backdrop for the challenges in siting criteria we will explore in future lessons.
You will learn about the grid history, how "green energy" will impact the grid, how siting new lines will be a significant national challenge, how conservation of energy at all levels of use will become an important component of the smart grid and how the smart grid will assist each of us in regulating our energy use. We will learn the new energy grid could become the 21st Century "National Highway System," and, finally, what will be the price tag for the new smart grid and who will pay for it.
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
This lesson will take us one week to complete. Please refer to the Calendar for specific timeframes and due dates. Specific directions for the assignments below can be found in this lesson.
If you have any questions, please post them to our Questions? discussion forum. I will check that discussion forum daily to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.
The Smart Grid website is maintained by the Federal government to provide the latest information on the progress of updating the electrical grid to a smart grid system. The smart grid initiative was authorized by Congress under Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The information contained on this smart grid website will give you a comprehensive look at what the Smart Grid is and how the Federal government, working with industry, is bringing the electrical grid into the 21st century.
Learn more about the Smart Grid at SmartGrid.gov [1]
Explore each aspect of the website by clicking on "Read More" under "Recovery Act Projects" and then navigating through each of the topics on the right sidebar of the website.
As you explore the website take time to understand what a smart grid is, how the smart grid is being implemented throughout the country, what efforts are being made to train the next generation of grid technicians and professionals, and what efforts are being implemented to standardize the system and protect it from cyber attacks.
The electric grid is interwoven into the fabric of our everyday lives just as the highway systems are. Without a vision and a systematic plan to upgrade and modernize the grid, we will experience outages that compromise our way of life, impact our economy, and jeopardize our security. The National Public Radio series Power Hungry: Reinventing the U.S. Electric Grid presents the history of the grid and the challenges of creating a new, smarter, "green" grid for the future. This series will give you a good introduction to these challenges and what is being discussed to take the grid into the 21st Century, and it will provide an excellent backdrop for the remainder of the course.
The Power Hungry series is a collection of National Public Radio broadcasts that have been placed on the Web and accompanied by text and visuals. Go to the Power Hungry website [2] and read the information and listen to the broadcasts for the entire series. It will take you one hour to listen to all of the broadcasts.
As you read and listen to the series, keep the following questions in mind...we will be discussing these in our lesson discussion assignment!
For this week, I want to you answer one of the questions listed below and comment on another student's post. This discussion will take place in a special discussion forum created for this purpose.
Because we will be using an online discussion forum that is asynchronous for this activity, you will need to begin work right away! Be sure to log into your group's discussion forum multiple times over the course of each day this week so that you can keep the discussion going.
All students are expected to participate in the questions in their group discussions in a concise, well-organized, and scholarly manner. Saying, “I agree with Jennifer” is not adequate. You need to say why you agree (or disagree) and support your comments. Comments should be based on information obtained from appropriate reference sources, including lesson materials, previous coursework, Web-based information, or personal experience. You must use proper grammar and spelling for all contributions.
Your contributions to this assignment will be graded on a 15-point scale. Look at the discussion rubric [3] for more details about my expectations.
In this lesson, you were introduced to a great NPR production about the electric transmission grid in the United States. This 10-part series took you from an aged grid looking for a brighter future to a new grid and habits. Along the way, you read about how the grid evolved, the problems the grid has in meeting current and future demands, and how those demands will require a reinvention of the grid as we know it. I hope you came away with a better understanding of how the grid operates and how important a modern grid is to the security and economic viability of not only the United States but also to every industrialized nation in the world.
You have finished Lesson 3. Double-check the list of requirements on the first page of this lesson to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before beginning the next lesson.
If you have anything you'd like to comment on, or add to, the lesson materials, feel free to post your thoughts in the Questions? Discussion Forum. For example, what did you have the most trouble with in this lesson?