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.