You and nearly every person and business in
the world are paying for more energy than
they’re using each month.
Nearly everything plugged in around your house
is currently wasting energy, but it doesn’t
have to be that way.
To explain how we got here, we have to go
back to the beginning of the Grid, i.e. the
electrical grid, often hailed as the greatest
engineering achievement of the twentieth century
and for good reason.
On September 4th, 1882, Thomas Edison’s
Pearl Street Station, the first central power
plant in the U.S., began producing electricity
and distributing it to several dozen customers.
At the time, that electricity was mainly used
to power old-timey lamps and motors.
As the electric grid grew across the entire
United States, and indeed power grids across
the world, they didn’t change all that much
outside of the major shift from direct current
to alternating current that happened in the
early 1900s following Nikola Tesla’s invention
of the induction motor.
However our consumption of electric energy
has changed dramatically, particularly since
the popularization of computers that have
led to increasingly complex electronics being
a part of our daily lives.
Our electricity needs are no longer quite
as predictable and simple as they once were,
but as our household devices have gotten smarter,
the electric power grid is still using analog
equipment that is up to 50 years old.
Doesn’t it make sense that our energy distribution
should evolve to meet the changes brought
about by our modern energy consumption?
The U.S. national electrical grid wastes up
to 70% of the energy it produces due to inefficiencies.
A lot of this waste occurs before the electricity
ever even reaches your home; often times,
the electricity is traveling several miles
over high voltage wires wasting energy heating
up the power lines and air around them.
Have you ever noticed power lines drooping
a bit rather than running straight across?
Well, it’s not all birds and gravity making
that happen.
It’s a physical sign of this heat energy
loss – when the cables heat up, they expand
which causes them to droop.
The benefit of alternating current allowing
us to send electricity much further using
high-voltage wires is also its drawback, because
we can’t actually use that dangerous level
of voltage in our homes.
That’s why you may have seen one of these
in your neighborhood, it’s an electrical
substation and it’s job is to transform
the electricity down to a lower voltage via
the aptly named transformers to run them through
the kind of power lines on wooden poles you’ll
see on your street.
But wait, the voltage is still way too high
for using safely in your home, that’s what
these things are for … they’re also transformers,
and they get the voltage down to 120 before
running it to the outlets in your home.
More energy is lost throughout this entire
process.
In fact if you stand near one of these substations
or wooden poles with transformers you might
even hear a humming noise – guess what?
That’s energy loss you’re hearing.
So all of that is where the majority of energy
loss happens.
While all of this inefficiency does technically
make the cost of electricity more expensive
for consumers; you personally can’t really
do anything about it.
It requires a major infrastructure overhaul
of the electrical grid.
But soon, there may be something you can do
about the energy that’s wasted after leaving
your outlet.
That’s electricity you’re actually being
charged for, regardless of whether or not
it’s used or lost to heat.
Think about it, we charge our phones by plugging
them into the same outlets we plug our TVs,
refrigerators, coffee machine, and every other
thing in our house.
But of course, all of these devices and appliances
don’t require the same amount of power.
As Popular Mechanics put it, it’s kinda
like filling pint glasses with a fire hose.
It works, but it’s messy.
If you’re watching this video with your
laptop or phone plugged in, you might even
be able to feel the problem.
Ever touch the part of your charger plugged
into the outlet and notice it feels hot?
That’s the same issue of electricity being
wasted as heat that we talked about earlier,
except now it’s electricity you’re paying
for.
This energy loss also manifests as fluctuations in lights
or vibrations in electronics, similar to the
hum of transformers.
Basically what’s happening here is your
electronics aren’t being fed the precise
amount of electricity they require to work,
so all the extra electricity is simply being
wasted.
You’d think with all the advancements in
technology and actual devices we use, this
problem would have been solved by now.
Well, it kind of has, it just hasn’t caught
on yet.
The technology that’s going to solve this
problem is called software-defined electricity.
A company called 3DFS has innovated a way
to use this technology to deliver exactly
as much power to every plugged-in device as
it needs in the moment, no more, no less.
This is one of 3DFS’s Software-Defined Power
Controllers.
It’s roughly the size of a microwave, but
it packs a lot of power.
It has two main jobs, the first being to correct
and balance the electrical network by measuring
electrical output in real time and distributing
it with absolute precision to each device,
meaning zero electricity is wasted in the
process.
Its other job is to report back the data its
collected on the electrical network through
the cloud, so you can actually open up your
phone and see and control the exact energy
consumption of all your devices in real time.
Chris Doerfler, founder of 3DFS, likens this
to an operating system for electrical networks.
To me, this is a major step missing in creating
the smart houses of the future we all know
are coming.
And it’s not just cool and saving you some
money on your energy bill, it’s actually
making your devices and electrical system in
your home run better and longer.
The battery in your laptop and phone will
be charged to their exact needs, more than
doubling their lifetime.
And their predictive analytics can actually
tell you when your devices might fail and why
As someone who's had to pay a couple hundred
bucks to replace a dead MacBook battery I’m
thrilled for this future.
As an added bonus, this system also works
as a surge protector for your entire home,
so a lightning strike won’t fry your electronics.
If software-defined electricity
were to become ubiquitous, we wouldn’t even
need AC to DC adapters anymore.
That’s that brick on your laptop charger
or little box on your phone charger.
How exactly 3DFS accomplishes all this is
perhaps even more impressive than the results.
Measuring and controlling the flow of electricity
in real time requires some pretty massive
processing power.
The software-defined power controllers process
over 294 million data points every second,
which is roughly 50,000 times the amount of
data processed by current smart meters.
In order to precisely measure electricity
at the nanosecond level, 3DFS invented a new
form of computing they call conveyor matrix
computing.
It analyzes the exact microsecond at which
to add or remove current to keep the flow
balanced, which is actually based on a simple
principle, Kirchhoff’s Current Law, which
you might know from your science classes as
the law of conservation of energy.
This states that energy cannot be created
or destroyed, only transformed, so in a closed
circuit the total amount of energy entering
and exiting the circuit amounts to zero, because
in theory it’s the same amount.
To achieve this, 3DFS stops excess energy
from converting into vibrations or heat, which
is the inefficient way our electrical system
currently balances out the use of energy.
When viewing the flow of electricity as a
waveform, the change is stark.
Here’s a waveform of what electricity flow
looks like now.
And here’s what it looks like using digital
electricity.
Notice how all those imperfections balanced
out.
So, no doubt this technology will save you
money on your monthly utility bill, on maintenance
of your electrical system, and your electronics.
But it actually extends further, having a
positive impact on the electrical grid itself.
By reducing the power consumption of your
home, you ease the burden on the utility companies
themselves, especially during peak demand.
It’s currently December, so imagine how
much energy we’d all be saving on optimizing
the electricity used by Christmas lights for
the next month.
Remember those substations in your neighborhood
I mentioned earlier?
The maintenance on those will also be reduced
because they’ll have to work less dealing
with imbalanced power consumption from homes
and businesses and returning reactive power
to the grid, which is essential in avoiding
neighborhood blackouts.
That’s millions of dollars worth of savings
just in grid maintenance costs, which as
a taxpayer, you’re paying for anyway.
So it’s a win-win.
For now, the main hurdle for this future to
become a reality is adoption of the technology.
Why would consumers want to install this in
their homes if they don’t even know the
problem it fixes exists?
At the moment, the main clients for software-defined
power controllers are large-scale operations
like data centers, which is not surprising
considering a large data center uses as much
electricity as a small town.
The benefits that come with installing this
technology in a data center are invaluable,
seeing as they are the heart and brain of
any technology company.
And even the U.S. military has taken note
of its potential uses.
This is one of the biggest breakthroughs in
energy efficiency since Nikola Tesla’s lifetime,
now they just need to convince the rest of
us we need it.
In the comments below, tell me some of the
tech woes digitized electricity could’ve
helped you avoid to make me feel better about
all the phone and computer batteries I’ve
spent money replacing over the years.
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Stay awesome, and as always, I’ll see you
in the future.
