For the next four years, all eyes are on China as it embarks on its most ambitious project to date: the construction of a massive infrastructure meant to wire up the entire country in a smart grid.
This radical switch from the traditional electric grid to a smart grid system is all part of China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2011-2015).
China hopes to revolutionize energy with its smart grid, to answer the nation's growing demand for clean, green power.
China’s certainly going to need it. China is currently the world’s largest consumer of electricity, and not just because it happens to be the most populated country worldwide, but mostly because China’s robust economy is growing by leaps and bounds, pulling well ahead of the U.S. The tens of thousands of manufacturing industries set up all over China are not only resource-hungry, they’re inevitably energy-intensive as well. China’s new smart grid is set to address the nation’s insatiable demand for power.
We’ve known for some time that a smart grid is meant to revolutionize the way whole cities and entire countries ration and use its electricity. And yet despite all the benefits of this ingenious system, no one has actually endeavored to revamp their electrical networks on such a grand scale as China. The U.S. is also keen on the smart grid, as a matter of fact 36 million households all over the U.S. have already been installed with smart meters, but you have to hand it to China for its sheer dedication.
Like all beautiful technologies, a smart grid has its down side too. It’s prone to security attacks and infiltration from cybercriminals. Also, because smart grids essentially communicate with individual homes’ smart meters, the issue of privacy is a concern. Another valid issue is the absolute control the government might exercise in distributing and allocating electricity, although China’s essentially communist government has pretty much taken care of that issue. As Jesse Berst points out in his article Smart Grid China, it’s well and good that China has no “messy democracy to deal with.” If the country needs clean, renewable energy via a smart grid, then GO!, no questions asked.
One other issue: installing a smart grid can be downright expensive. But China has already weighed the benefits and the costs. The State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), elected by Beijing to undertake the smart grid project countrywide, is investing more than $400 billion in power grid construction. About $100 billion of that figure will be used for China smart grid technologies. This is not just a simple case of repairing and retrofitting existing power networks; SGCC ambitiously plans to build all the necessary infrastructures from scratch.
SGCC is currently the world’s largest utility, supplying electricity to about 90 percent of all China, with the remainder of the pie serviced by Southern Power Grid Co. based in Guangzhou.
If China’s 12th five-year development plan proceeds accordingly, the nation will have clean, green energy countrywide with minimal to zero carbon emissions, a reduced dependency on fossil fuel energy, and a reduced energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by as much as 16 percent.
With an efficient smart grid, information on energy demand patterns and other factors can be used by utility companies to wisely allocate, adjust, and appropriately price power. Also China smart grid hopefully will tap into renewable sources such as wind and solar power.
For all these to happen, the five-year plan enjoins the cooperation of six major industries:
- Clean energy manufacturing (such as wind and solar power generation)
- Smart home appliances and consumer electronics
- Electric vehicle industry (China is increasing support for electric vehicles (EVs) with an expected 400,000 charging points by 2016)
- New materials industry (including superconductors and nano-materials, photoelectric conversion materials, energy storage materials)
- Infrastructure manufacturing (including new electrical and electronic devices, and transformers)
- Information and communication (including instrumentation, sensors, software, etc)
Hopefully, the smart grid has far-reaching benefits other not just confined to China, benefits that readily spill over to other countries, especially First World nations notorious for their power consumption. Already, the installation of affordable smart meters in China has driven prices down to a competitive level in other countries. Also, the various frameworks used by China could very well be adopted by other nations looking for smart grid solutions.
