Balanced energy credits/debits over the grid

Another idea to do with electricity networks has to do with considering how wide spread storage over the electricity grid would change the network. At first storage units and electric cars might be able to schedule their coordinated energy downloads at off peak times to smooth out the load over a network. Renewable energy sources could feed straight into the grid or directly into storage units. You might consider something similar to a neural firing pattern for renewable sources where they slowly build up a unit of charge or energy and then discharge it into the network once the accumulated amount of energy passes some specified threshold. The energy impulses further down the network might work on a similar pattern of slow build up and then a rapid discharge but with larger quanta as appropriate.

A technical question is to what extent could you balance a discharge of a quanta of energy into the network and extract a comparable quanta of energy from the network at a different location in such a way that keeps the load over the network steady. There would be a time delay as the signal propagates over a distance so what would be the furthest apart that you could have a balanced credit and debit energy transaction over an electricity grid without making the network unstable. If large energy transactions were out of phase or unbalanced you could have wild fluctuations over a network. An advantage of this approach might be that you might be able to shift large amounts of energy very quickly and in volumes that far exceed the analogue network capacity.

[It's not an information signal but an energy signal (Bosons?) if you could express it that way. Force may be a better expression for a signal through a change in energy. I don't know - I haven't studied this (fields) in any depth. When will I learn that it is best not to publish paragraphs like this? ]

Could balanced credit and debit transactions over an electricity grid, using specified quanta of energy over bounded windows of time, change the nature of electricity networks? After a while if almost all transactions over a grid are balanced it may be possible to lower the average load level (baseload) to zero, thus turning the electricity grid into a medium for moving energy around rather than a distribution network as it is now. Its a question about comparing analogue with digital. In analogue grids that predominate now the load is matched with the electricity generated, so there is an energy balance over the network as a whole. My question is about the effect that small scale balanced and bounded demand/supply transactions locally within the grid would have, as well as the global matching of load with generated energy. Perhaps the two approaches are complimentary. A slight baseload could be maintained over a network to match the energy dissipated through keeping the energy storage and transaction systems going. There is a difference in the two approaches. There may be huge advantages in going digital over an electricity grid.

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Written during the eclipse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar eclipse of August 1, 2008

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2 August

Another relevant point is that the current analogue grid infrastructure can gradually be transformed into a digital energy system. This will most likely be the greatest change in energy systems that will make them sustainable. A large number of renewable energy sources will fit naturally into this transformed system and eventually the large polluting power stations can be decommissioned. The approach that posits nuclear power as an answer to global warming is wrong in nearly every aspect.

Finally, we have this crisis now because what we were doing in the past was not appropriate. Historians look to the past to see what happened. Poetics looks to the future and what can be. There is still a tie in from past to future in the case of energy systems and that bridge has to do with the sciences. We can not solve these problems of global warming by doing only the same as we have done and thinking about the systems involved in all the same ways. Luckily, we are within reach of the science and technology that we need to design and build sustainable energy systems, and eventually to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. That ability was not even there 30 years ago. It would still take some R&D to build those systems though. The potential rewards far outweigh the risks.