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Jim Yanik

(Gordon Burditt) wrote in
:

The often-stated case for smart meters (for electricity) is that
they allow for time-of-use billing.

I thought one of the cases for smart meters was that they allowed
the utility to avoid having to build more generating capacity for
peak loads and replace it with "greenouts":

The answer to that depends on how your electricity infrastructure is
constructed on a corporate level.

Some (or many, or most?) utilities just maintain a local distribution
grid and don't actually generate any power themselves - they just
purchase power for re-distribution to their customers.

The north-american power grid is large enough, and diverse enough, to
be about to (a) always have spare capacity somewhere on the grid, and
(b) be able to move that spare capacity around so it gets to those
that need it, when they need it.

Please explain the existence of "rolling blackouts", then. It
happened in Texas during both peak load times in the summer, and in
the winter when the excuse was that some of the plants on standby had
some equipment freeze or fail when they were needed.

not all electric utility area grids are connected to the "national grid",if
there is such a thing.
It's probably more like several areas have their own local grids.
trying to transfer power across the entire US would be wasteful and
inefficient.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com