 Okay, hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us. This is our seventh session of our iSchool Insights virtual webinar series. This is a series we've been hosting throughout this summer and will continue in the fall as well. It is really featuring lectures, presentations, and other opportunities for engagement with our iSchool faculty, our leadership alumni, and some of our current students as well. So again over the past couple of weeks in the summer we've covered many of the trending topics that are in the information field and really just trying to give you an opportunity to learn directly from and engage with our iSchool faculty experts and our students or both current and former students who are really actively engaged in the information fields. Please stay tuned for our information about our next sessions. That'll be coming in both in your emails as well as on our website as well. I'll lay a couple kind of ground rules before we get started. We are recording this session so it's going to be made available on the on the web page. So just so you know I am recording right now. In terms of an agenda we'll kick it off to Professor Dedrick. He'll do his presentation and then we'll use whatever time that is remaining to do a question and answer session with Professor Dedrick. I'll go over the questions procedures when we're at that point but basically we'll be able to either raise your hand or indicate in the chat function that you'd like to ask a question and then I can make sure that your microphone is unmuted and you can ask that question audibly or if it's easier you can always just write your questions in the chat box and I will read the questions aloud for Professor Dedrick. So before I kick it off Professor Dedrick I'll give him a quick introduction. Jason Dedrick is a a professor at the School of Information Studies, the iSchool at Syracuse University. A faculty fellow at the Syracuse Center of Excellence. He's also affiliated with I believe the Director of the University's Smart Grid Research Center. He has a wide arranging kind of set of research interests which include the globalization of information technology, the economic and organizational impacts of information technologies, the offshoring of knowledge work, global value chains, wind energy industries, and the adoption of smart grid technologies by electrical utility companies as well as the related privacy issues related to smart meters. Professor Dedrick's presentation today is going to focus on I believe the kind of the latter half of those research interests that I just described and it is titled the Smart Grid Technologies, Transforming the Electric Grid with Advanced Information Systems. So without any further ado from me I'll kick it off to Professor Jason Dedrick. Thank you. Thanks Mike. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the San Diego campus of the iSchool which is where I am right now. That's nice and bright and bright and early here so I've got a lot of energy and ready to talk to you about my research. Let me say hi to everyone, Abjit Abu, Anjuman Ben Brendon, Dia, Jessica, John, Komal, Mengxuan, Mike, Peter, Michita, Sandro, Shri Pad, a friend of mine, actually works for me, and Trishala and Yujo. Anyone miss anyone? Cool I'm glad I'm glad to have you here. So as I said I'm here in the cross country from from our our main office and main campus, doing my teaching and service and everything online and virtually, but let's face it we're all virtual now these days aren't we? Transitioning from virtual back to a kind of semi-virtual semi course situation on campus. Maybe later we'll talk a little bit about what you guys are doing and what your expectations are of this call quarter and you know just just open it up a little bit later, but to start with I want to talk with talk with you about some research we're doing on the smart grid and just to frame this a little bit, you know here we are in the year of the pandemic and we just heard yesterday that Google's workers are going to be working from home as long as next July, so almost another year, that's the plan is to be working virtually. A lot of us are working virtually, have all these great tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams and we've come to to know and sometimes love and one thing that they all have in common is that none of them would work without one thing. Anyone want to guess what that one thing is? You can win a point by raising your hand and guessing. Unfortunately there's no class here so I don't have any place to put that point. What is the thing we can't live without? I'm sure people can hear me calling on you. I've got plenty of answers in the chat you're Professor Dudrick. Oh okay that's what I need to be looking at I'm not going to find the chat okay so I don't see chat. Give me a couple examples of the answers Mike. We have yeah certainly many answers ranging internet, electricity, power, people, technology, that kind of runs the gamut there. All right two of you got the one I was looking for power electricity okay all of this mind-bending technology that we have at our fingertips works only as long as there's electricity unless we come up with something else for these computers to run on. In fact it's not just our computers it's not just what we're working with but pretty much everything in our life would stop without electricity. Pull the plug on the power and you have nothing. You'll have food for a very short time you won't have transportation for very long. You won't have a place to live with heat or light. You won't have a job. Civilization as we know it would pretty much cease to exist if we had a few weeks without electricity. So it's an important point if we want to keep our civilization going that we need to keep the electric grid safe and reliable and dependable as it as we become used to in our lives. Let me just see the chat. Just skip the chat. When someone chats just give me a holler. Jumping ahead life with no power. See if I can get this slide to come up. Okay this is what life with no power looks like and the largest and most powerful city in the United States which is New York City. In 2012 there's a hurricane called Superstorm Sandy which did a tremendous amount of damage. As you can see lower Manhattan is dark. Except for one building there looks like it has a generator that might be running. The subways were flooded. The power lines underground power lines were flooded. Everything was out. Manhattan was not prepared for this kind of disaster and in its surrounding areas really were not prepared for the damage to the electric line. So what happened? A tremendous power outages. New York City itself over 800,000 New Yorkers lost their power for over 10 days. Out on Long Island to the east of the city over 630,000 Long Islanders were left dark for two weeks. So you can imagine how life is getting along it for two weeks without power. New Jersey's biggest utility public service enterprise group had severely damaged infrastructure and 1.7 million outages. So you can see in the case of just one major storm how the utility grid in the major metropolitan area can be knocked out and knocked out for a long time. Another example is what happened in Puerto Rico in 2017 and 2019. Okay in 2017 Hurricane Maria arrived and the tremendous damage to the electric grid took 11 full months to restore power. So there were people a month after month after month with no electricity. Some of them may have had diesel generators but a lot of them had no access to power. Then just as they were getting the grid rebuilt there was there were two earthquakes in 2019 and 2020 and again two-thirds of the utilities customers were made without power for days. So what are some of the things we can do about that? Some of you raised your hand. Oh someone entered the waiting room. Gotcha okay I'm going to give you a contrast note. In another major storm Hurricane Harvey hit the southeast coast of Texas around Houston 50 inches of rain. Now I don't know if you've ever lived for 50 inches of rain. I haven't. That is an enormous amount of rain that come down in a couple days. The storm just hit and sat there and just drenched that area. Because widespread devastation in Houston and the surrounding areas nearly a million million customers of the utility centerpoint energy lost electricity. These power lines were down and substations flooded. You can see the area that the hurricane hit which is you know Texas is a big state so this is a very large area and the reddest color is where they had the heaviest rain up to 50 inches. This picture on the right kind of looks like a piece of abstract art but what it really is is an electric substation underwater. So you see the reflection of some of the transformers things that are above water reflecting in the water. Unfortunately electrical equipment doesn't really run very well on its underwater so that's a bit of a problem they're facing. Okay and yet in this case they didn't take 11 months to get the power back or they didn't take two weeks to get the power back or three weeks. As some of the other cases we looked at but instead service was restored to over 580,000 customers within just four days and was maintained for most customers while the rest of the repairs were made. Okay so power was back in a matter of days rather than weeks or months. You can imagine the people of Houston appreciated that and you can imagine that the amount of economic damage was much less in that case than it was in New York or in Puerto Rico. So how did they do this? Well this is going to lead to the topic of mostly what I want to talk about today which is smart grid technologies. So when Hurricane Hurricane what was the name of that hurricane? Hannah? Harvey. It was an H. When Hurricane Harvey hit it was about 10 years after another big hurricane hit called Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Ike did a lot of damage and so the utility decided to make a lot of investments in smart grid technologies to make the grid smarter and to make it more resistant and more resilient and you can see the results with how fast they were able to respond to this major storm. So when you think about the U.S. electric grid we have a large number of challenges facing the grid right now. The U.S. electric grid is over 100 years old to a large extent it doesn't look that much different than it did 100 years ago. Our grandparents if they were around and happened to see the grid in those days could come back today and look at the grid and say hmm looks pretty much the same. Same kind of layout, same structures functioning the same as it ever has been but its effectiveness is declining and it's facing several challenges that require the transformation of the grid for it to still be effective and viable. The first big challenge is the reliability and resilience of the grid. So the U.S. electric grid lost more power in 285 percent more power in 2015 than it did 30 years ago earlier in 1984. So the record of reliability and resilience has gotten worse over the years and these extreme weather events like Harvey and like Maria and Sandy are becoming more and more frequent as we have more climate change more global warming and we see expansion of water we see warmer water that drives more powerful storms. So all of these events are starting to become more and more common and are a serious threat to continued reliability of the grid. Second challenge is sustainability. This is the challenge to the environment caused by the electric grid. Right now about 25 percent of all carbon emissions in the U.S. come from electricity generation. So if you think about it carbon emissions come from a lot of things they come from cars running they come from buildings they come from a kinds of manufacturing activity they even come from volcanoes and various other sources out of those fully 25 percent just come from generating electricity mainly because generation is done with fossil fuels. Okay coal and natural gas are the main sources of power in the U.S. Okay in order to reduce those carbon emissions we need to increase the supply of renewable energy sources. We do have renewable sources whether it's hydropower or whether it's solar power or wind power geothermal power even nuclear power that are zero emission or low emission sources and so shifting the grid to those sources can make the grid and and our society more more sustainable by reducing the power of the emissions associated with the grid. But as we'll talk about those renewable energy sources especially sun solar power and wind are variable meaning they don't run at the same amount all day long you know the sun goes down at night or if it goes behind a cloud or if a wind turbine stops running because there's no wind now you don't have power so that's a problem right so if we if we're going to switch to renewables we're going to have to deal with times when there's no power and we have to make adjustments to that and as we'll talk about the smart grid and actually play a role play a role in responding to that to get an idea of what the sustainability challenge is this just this slide just shows the carbon immensity intensity of carbon emissions in the electric sector and the building sector okay so the electric grid which is there in green has come down from about 2500 million metric tons in the US and put in 2005 to a little over 1500 by 2018 so it's actually down by 26 percent which is good progress a lot of that's come from replacing coal natural gas to some extent but also by introducing more renewables to replace both of those and the power to the buildings and carbon emissions from building hasn't changed much so some progress is being made but there's a long way to go to get to net zero which is the goal of a lot of companies now a lot of utilities and other companies to have a net zero carbon footprint so some ways that we can get there are to continue to use less electric power for our existing uses but also to shift uses such as buildings and automobiles to electricity so an electric car or an electric building can be supplied by electricity which can be all or mostly renewable so you imagine you buy your electric vehicle and you've got solar panels on your roof and you always charge your car when it's a nice sunny day and you're never using any fossil fuels to charge that car and the car itself doesn't have gasoline doesn't have diesel it's running entirely on electricity and if that electricity is generated by non-carbon sources then your driving can be zero carbon the same with your building so using energy in the form of natural gas a lot of times to heat and cool your house and if you swap out electricity for natural gas you can also greatly reduce the carbon impacts of buildings any questions comments i think i've lost my yeah feel free to jump in and if you can just holler or you can raise your hand if you have any thoughts change the settings so everyone can unmute themselves whenever they'd like so if you do have a question feel free to jump in or use the chat box and i'll read it aloud to professor dendron yeah i don't and i'm encouraging you to talk it's a good you know if you're going to be in our school you're going to have to talk uh we're not a very we don't have a passive approach to learning good you show you got one yeah yeah i just wonder professor can you talk a little bit more about the buildings like like it's like what's the difference between buildings and like compared with the electric power like i i can understand electric power but i don't know the buildings so building has to do a few things they need to be heated if the weather's cold they need to be um cooled if the weather's hot they have most buildings have water which needs to be heated for you know it's just for general use or if there's some kind of process going on that needs hot water um so the building most buildings are using natural gas for a number of those purposes the stove a lot of you know my house has an electrical or a natural gas stove we have a water heater that uses natural gas um i don't know what else we use but a couple major appliances and so these appliances are burning natural gas all the time and that natural gas as it's burned is being released into the atmosphere it has a lot of methane more or less what natural gas is and that's a that's a greenhouse gas it's not as long lasting greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide but it's actually more powerful greenhouse gas so methane tends to get released when you burn it but it also tends to get lost as it's generated and it's as it goes through the pipes to come to your house there's leakage and so because of that using natural gas in the in a building is actually a significant contributor to global warming the climate change so if you could make that shift of those appliances from natural gas over to electricity and then supply the electricity with clean energy with renewable energy you're going to have an effect on both the electric power grid and on the buildings which are too many resources that makes sense uh yeah thanks okay and i don't have it in the picture here but automobiles are a tremendous and cars trucks everything even ships and boats are tremendous generators of greenhouse gas and one way to reduce that is to as i said charge the vehicle you know get an electric vehicle instead of a internal combustion engine vehicle and charge that vehicle when the sun is shining with your with your own solar panels right so you can imagine the taking the emissions associated with electric power the emissions associated with buildings and the emissions associated with travel with automobiles and other other vehicles being greatly reduced if we make the move to electricity and then provide the electricity with clean energy now this sounds easy enough natural gases i mean solar and wind are now the two cheapest support supplies of of electricity in the world uh used to be natural gas was cheaper but now coal is completely non-competitive and natural gas is kind of even with with solar and wind in a lot of places and some places solar or wind is the cheapest source so the cheap energy is there the electric cars are there the ability to make that shift to electricity is there but there are some challenges and one challenge speaking of california is the california duck curb now you might be able to see this slide and if you have a good imagination you can kind of picture the duck if i can mark this along here but here's the tail of the duck and then this goes down to the belly of the duck and then this comes up to the head that clear so the reason it's called a duck curve is this is the total electric load in california year after year starting with 2012 and then going down to 2020 and what happens this load represents the amount of power that california needs to draw from the grid and in the early part of the day for midnight about 6 p.m 6 a.m it's flat there's no solar power and so and people are just kind of getting up or sleeping and they're not doing much so not much changes but about 9 a.m the sun comes out and what happens then is as you get more and more sun which are not on this picture the amount of power needed from the grid it's lower so you get this low belly of the curve because people don't need to draw so much electricity from the grid because they've got their own solar just providing it or if you look at it at the wholesale level the way california is looking at it they're looking at all of the solar on the grid which is people's houses but also these giant solar farms that are scattered all over the state in california so in midday the system operator who has to make sure the power stays is actually can go into a negative situation where they're paying people to take solar power you know just to get rid of it and then later in the day the sun starts to go down and by about six o'clock people are coming home from work they're starting to cook and they're starting to use their TVs and their devices and using you know the air conditioning if it's summer you see this steep steep curve going up to that head of the duck and what that requires they have to meet that demand every second and so the way they do it is they have these power plants usually natural gas that they call peaker plants and they're called that because they provide power at peak demand so what the utility does when they go from that bottom down here up to the top is they have a bunch of natural gas plants sitting and waiting to come on they're called spinning reserves because they're actually like the turbines are spinning and they're ready to provide power as needed and they may need to provide in a matter of seconds to keep the power going and to keep the power quality so your lights aren't off the bring it going crazy and so they do this kind of highly choreographed adding of of capacity from that low part of the belly all the way up to the head of the duck it's risky if something doesn't work just right you can lose power all together it's very expensive these power plants that are just sitting around waiting most of the year are very expensive because they cost a lot of money and they have to recap that money in a few hours a year so every day you're going through this very expensive and risky process with the California duck crew so is that visible to everybody any questions that you see that you see the duck in there we're going to see another duck in a little bit later ducks are an important part of electricity as we'll find okay so what's the solution to all these problems we've got these issues of resilience failing systems the demand to bring on more renewables that challenge of the intermentancy or the variable nature of renewables the wind's not always shining the sun's not always blowing or vice versa one solution is the smart grid okay and what's a smart grid smart grid applies digital technologies to make the grid more reliable resilient and clean so to try to solve those three challenges that we've just talked about reliability resilience and cleanliness emissions and smart grid is actually a very complex system but some of the key elements are smart meters we talk about AMI advanced metering infrastructure which are these smart meters that sit on the house and communicate two ways they receive information from the grid and they send information from the grid from the house to the grid okay so that gives a two-way communication and real-time monitoring with customers there's also monitoring and control technologies you probably have heard of the iot the internet of things well the smart grid is one big internet of things it has monitors and sensors and controllers all over it so they can see if the frequency is getting out of phase on a certain part of the grid they can see if part of the grid is being overloaded if there's if there's too much load and it may go down they can see if a big transformer is about to blow and bring down the grid all of this monitoring has been put on in recent years to watch monitor the performance of the grid and send that information back to analyze now where do they send their data back yeah yeah i'm just wondering how would smart grids help in situations like hurricane the beginning slides that you showed how would smart grids help in such a situation like i can't connect with how would it even be helpful how would it connect with the the duct nerve or with the resilience with the resilience because if there is a hurricane these grids also they want to get flooded and submerged in it so and the consumer might not still get the power despite leaving on a smart grid correct i mean i can't connect on how this can avoid a problem like a hurricane okay so this is what happened in in houston and has happened in other places if the grid is smart it lets you know immediately if a power line is down so what happens a lot of times in a hurricane is the wind will knock down power poles and power lines will come down and people will lose their power now in the old days the only way to find out that the power was out is if somebody called on the telephone and said hey my power is out and that's kind of hit and miss you have to figure out where they are you don't really have any more information that somebody's power is out and then they would send a truck to go drive around that area and see if they could find out where the problem was so this is pretty slow and inefficient with smart meters and iot if the power goes out on 100 houses the smart meter sends a message to call last gas message like i'm dying and it goes back to the data center where the utility is operating and the utility can see exactly which houses are up they can also see if some of the power lines are down and beyond the streets or something because those have monitors on them too so they're sitting in a command center effectively and they're looking at where their power outages they can look at how those relate to the location of different substations and different elements of the grid and say aha this is where the problem is and they tell their repair crews to take the truck to the exact spot where the problem is and they can turn off the power and fix it and get the power back on very quickly they don't have to be driving around trying to find where the problem was it's all visualized to them that the crews will be carrying something like a tablet which will be connected to the utility and they'll get you know a message go three blocks down you know smith street and there's where your problem is so the efficiency of knowing where problems are and being able to see new problems in real time enables them to restore power much more quickly you know to do it in four hours instead of four days also with the two-way communications they can let people know they send messages to people and say hey we know your power is out our crews are working on it and we expect to have power back in four hours and so the people you know before this if your power went out you just sat there in the dark and wondered if when it was going to come back on with no idea now you get a message on your phone that says yeah you should have your power back in four hours and then you can say to yourself oh good you know my food will be okay for four hours you know if they say it's going to be 48 hours then my food's going to spoil you know because i don't have refrigerators so you have a lot more information to know like how you're going to survive this and it makes the whole repair and restoration of the grid much faster and much more efficient okay yeah so that's a great question it also helps with the duct grid but i'm going to get to that and when i get to some data that we have so the the smart grid has a number of elements there's actually meters on houses that send back information like this little city network up on the right hand corner these houses and they send meters but there's also the distribution grid the transmission grid and the big power plants on the left you have a network connecting all of those all those little lines are basically communications network going back and forth from one part of the grid to the other and on the bottom you have a bunch of different software systems that perform different functions on the grid okay you have transmission management you have dms which is demand service oms is outage management asset management all of these are you can think of as software and systems that are the brains of the smart grid basically they take all that information coming from the iot and from the outside and turn it into useful information if you look at smart grid as a technology stack which is a kind of a typical way we look at things you can see there's a power layer which is actual physical power and devices the communication layer which is like smart meters and two-way networks they use and then there's a software and data analytics layer which is the brains of this whole thing software for customer service for price and usage and billing and mobile apps and so on AMI is the smart meters for meter reading connect disconnect meter data management and what i'm calling broadly the internet of things which is these devices that monitor the grid assets can provide predictive maintenance to tell you that all this transformer is probably going to go down in the next six months because the the oil is getting bad and also do demand forecasting and demand response so smart grid adoption by utilities has been limited there was a big grant from the department of energy in early 2010s and quite a bit of investment went in and yet since that time the adoption by utilities is lagged and remains highly uneven some utilities have a hundred percent smart meters and some have none at all somewhere in between so we're asking ourselves when we did this research why is that if this thing is so valuable and so obviously everyone why isn't everyone adopting it okay um this is not really necessary but it's a quick picture of the utility industry and transition from locally regulated monopolies in the 1980s where one company would own the generation transmission distribution and retail to today where you have some integrated but you also have these other kinds of models where you have independent generators that run their own power plants may sell to the isos which are state-level system operators and then you have companies that provide tnd which is transmission and distribution and then you have retailers so it's a much more complex market system now than it was 23 years ago so we did a research project where we looked at smart grid adoption and tried to figure out why we were seeing this pattern that we were did a series of interviews a survey and some focus groups to collect information on the grid and what was happening there our conceptual model was something called the TOE which is the technology organization and environment model on the point there is the technological decision-making like adopting the smart grid is driven by factors related to the technology itself to the nature of the organization and to the environment in which it's happening so a few a few things we found out from our interviews and other surveys technology factors were important utilities had to see perceived benefits had to perceive some benefits and the main ones that they saw were cost avoidance and increased reliability and they also saw perceived risks that the technology was still immature it was still pretty new and that it was expensive so there were pros and cons with the technology organizational factors that made a difference top-down management if top management favored smart grid adoption that tended to drive down through the organization and then the lead to greater adoption rates from the bottom up and throughout the organization a strong innovation culture leads to greater adoption innovation culture is one of those things you can measure and you can see it it's hard to know where it came from you know why is why is one organization more innovative than others is a good question but we found when that kind of culture was there that there was higher levels adoption and finally the ownership there's three different types of utilities these big investor-owned utilities with a lot of financial and human resources we found they were more likely to adopt smart grid technologies than their counterparts the municipally owned and the cooperative which serves smaller areas across the country there's actually 3 000 electric utilities in the u.s and they come from all sides and shapes and ownership environmental factors consumer attitudes were a factor because it was not always clear to the consumer what the benefits were of these technologies and they had concerns about privacy and safety and also the regulatory environment as all of the smart grid projects have to be approved by their local regulator and the evaluation criteria tends to favor low risk you know the criteria criteria is was it a prudent investment and is it used and is it useful and you're talking about things like software and technology it's pretty hard to know ahead of time if it's really going to be used and useful you actually have to build it and see if people use it we did a survey where we looked at motivations for adoption and obstacles to adoption in smart grid by us utility companies and the motivations we found number one was improved reliability you see way out here over 80 percent of the companies mentioning them and next was improved operational efficiency and after that was reducing costs so again these are low risk investments they're very operational we can improve our reliability and efficiency and lower our costs things like keeping up with industry peers or integrating renewables or distributed education not that important you know they were in it for very tangible predictable results and in terms of obstacles you see kind of the opposite that the biggest obstacle was technology immaturity the companies felt that this smart meter and smart grid technology hadn't been around long enough there weren't widely accepted standards they didn't know if the next you know version two of the technology was going to make version one obsolete which of course we know happens a lot in information technologies so and some of them lacked internal expertise to to make it work so again the obstacles tend to be just lack of money and the technology is not ready okay so we interpreted that as pointing to the central role of risk so in all of these cases you see risk hiding in terms of technology IT technology is generally riskier than non IT you know putting in software is more risky than putting in an upgraded transformer which you know what it's going to do organizationally utilities tend to be risk averse they've had that long culture of being a regulated monopoly and did not do a lot of affection for risk and the regulatory environment in the u.s. is very slow to get any kind of investment improved takes a long time you have to go through literally a court process and get it approved by a public utility commission and as i'll show you next the risk to utility is almost unlimited if they make a bad investment while the returns are limited so i want to give an example of a utility called PG&E Pacific Gas and Electric which operates in northern california and PG&E was a leader in adopting smart mid grid technologies as you can see in the statement from the company from 2017 to 2018 Pacific Gas and Electric continue to build capabilities to deliver on its vision of modernizing its grid innovative programs and plans detailed in this report help PG&E achieve the vision while also maintaining a safe and reliable grid so they've been investing heavily for years to make the grid safe and reliable and unfortunately it hasn't all worked so for 1500 california fires were caused in the past six years including the deadliest one ever in 2018 that killed about 80 people in a town called pleasant and i mean paradise pleasant is what donald trump called it actually paradise is a town in northern california which is almost totally wiped off in response the next year pg&e just cut off power to over a million customers and left them in the dark because they didn't want the power lines to spark and start new blazes and in the end PG&E is filed for bankruptcy and its future is up in the air so you can see how much risk there is even if you've been installed and deployed these technologies so that's just a little story about smart grid research and if you have any questions i will answer them but i want to tell you what we have that might be of interest and fun for you if you're interested in this kind of thing at the iSchool we have at the smart grid research center where i'm the director a lot of data that we're working with so just to give you one example we have data from an organization called pecan street Inc which is in austin texas we have data on about 1200 homes in four different states we have data on electricity use in electricity generation at one minute intervals for about 15 to 20 appliances in each house for over seven years and if you multiply that out as i did in my calculator yesterday it comes out to roughly 58 billion 867 million data points so if you like big data you want to play with big data we've got some it may not be the kind of big data that google has but you know it'll keep you busy you know you you learn something about wrangling a large amount of data um lining up the necessary computer power to analyze it and manage it and visualize it and so on um just to give you an example of something we did going back to what we were talking about before we took the data from 90 homes in austin they all have solar and we looked at average energy use and solar generation over one day in july of 2015 okay now the blue line is the sum of those 90 houses electricity usage so you can see it starts at about 150 kilowatts at midnight drops off a bit during the day and then starts going up and up until it hits about 300 kilowatts in the late afternoon um the the yellow line using our syracuse colors here is the solar generation so you can see there's none until about seven in the morning because it's dark and then it starts to go up and a nice smooth curve and peaks out at about midnight and then i mean noon and then drops back down until late afternoon and if you look at the gray curve this is what the grid needs to provide to these houses okay this is where there's an excess of solar in the middle of the day and the grid demand actually goes negative and then the demand starts rising very rapidly in the late afternoon so for extra credit that gray scale what would you call that anyone what does it look like the duck curve correct you see the duck it turns out the duck curve is all over the place any place where you have a lot of solar you have a duck curve so it's not just california and it's a big problem to deal with that duck curve so one of the things you have to do is to have data to be able to predict demand ahead of time you might notice here that this is july and the average high temperature in austin is 95 degrees fahrenheit or 35 celsius and when you have a hot day this blue demand curve is being driven mostly by air conditioning different times of the year you get seasonal variations so we're comparing january to july here and you can see that the demand the blue is much higher in july it goes up to 300 kilowatt hours whereas in january it never goes much above 100 and as i know it on the side the average temperature in july is 95 degrees for high temperature and in january it's 46 degrees so in january there's no air conditioning not much heating there's also not nearly as much solar the peak is is a little bit lower it's a much shorter period of the day that you're getting solar so as you go from season to season this this demand picture changes a lot and utilities have to be able to respond to those changes and plan ahead to make sure that they can be the low and also this year-to-year change so this is both in october whether it's a year apart you can see that just because it's so october doesn't mean you know what the supply and demand is going to look like so you need all of this data to start to build up a picture and to be able to actually forecast what your needs are going to be and all of that is made possible by those smart grid and by data analytics okay so opportunities opportunities to work with our data we've got this data the con street data that i mentioned and some other data sets such as weather data that you can use there's text from utility interviews privacy policies and other documents so if you're interested in text analysis we have projects going on in that along with more traditional data data analysis and opportunities we have students that work for the the center you usually have about two at any given time working on projects and we've had about 15 over the years most of the work involves data management administrative analytics and visualization you can also use the data for projects outside the lab if they're student led or faculty led so if you have your own project idea or you're working with a faculty that has an idea you can make use of that data there are some restrictions in how it can be used in the pecan street license but we can work that out some data can also be made available for classroom project so all of this is available to you and i hope you'll make use of it if you're interested you can contact me uh it's my email and there's our our smart research center which sits in 205 find cell and we have a website with more information on our research projects and so so i think i used up all my time unfortunately but if you want to hang out a couple minutes does anyone have um questions i'm happy to stay on a little bit in answer any other questions sir uh this is the way i was i had a question uh sir we talk a lot about industrial iot and you know predictive maintenance in nuclear power plants power plants in all these places but recently uh during covid a situation there was a blast in a power thermal power stations in india how could a smart grid have prevented this because it happened basically due to negligence do you know the do you know what the cause was of the explosion uh so basically uh there were there was supposed to be some kind of you know maintenance people were supposed to go and check but due to covid they couldn't you know visit the power plant and uh made negligence and all these things a temperature rose and there was a blast in the boiler yeah so i mean the internet of things would consist of a lot of different monitors or sensors so ideally you would have sensors on the equipment and that they would pick up a change in temperature or a change in pressure that might not be obvious from the outside but if they're measuring temperature and pressure and um vibration or whatever it might be they may pick up small fluctuations and give you some warning that there might be a problem there and when that iot data comes back usually to the data center or to the cloud or wherever it's analyzed there's data analytic tools and software that can take that information into into their algorithms and say ah if i see pressure rising here and i see power quality dropping over there and i see temperature rising there i put those three things together in my algorithm and it says uh uh oh there's likely going to be a problem with that transformer or that piece of the grid and bypass that you know shut down and bypass that piece of the grid before you get the explosion okay that's that's kind of in a nutshell what what the iot and the associated software that goes with the iot and the data analytics can do professor dedrick i've got a question from chat and then i think we have another from trishla as or hand raised um from the chat is from brendan um it's an interesting one uh he's an incoming uh library student masters in library and information science student and this is uh how can libraries or librarians as a profession how can they kind of support and get involved in this smart grid research um so the parts of this so that i mean you you may be interested in the smart grid per se in terms of how libraries are powered and and whether the libraries are moving towards green energy you know there's a lot of buildings library buildings certainly around the country you would have a large number of buildings and so they would have the same issues with energy of you know carbon footprint reliability and the things that we talked about before um in which case the same kinds of applications smart grid applications sensing data analytics could make those buildings more efficient and more reliable and reduce the carbon footprint and also kind of from the perspective of you coming in as an mlis student um our our data sets in our labs are available to students they're not just available to iam students or whatever it's one you know we invited everybody to this to this talk today because anyone can come in and get some experience and hands-on experience with a really big data big data set and what you learn i think with that data you know you could transpose that and say okay if i were in charge of facilities and energy management for a library a library system or campus how would i use those tools what could they do for me and you know you could build a project where you actually have real time data maybe from some of the buildings to do that is that how so answer actually yes thank you now i've got hands raised i think we'll wrap up uh we'll first those questions next and then abhijith so tryst to go ahead i think you can unmute yourself to know how would the grid detect itself from hackers and hackers it's connected to the internet and using iot device it's quite susceptible to hacks so how would it protect itself the sound was a little bit batterishly we were talking about hacks into the system yeah i believe professorship how how can the grid kind of protect itself from from hacks so i'll say one thing the grid has already been infiltrated there's a lot of evidence that foreign and international people have already sort of preposition different kinds of malware on the grid the grid has been attacked in certain times the grid in in ukraine was attacked allegedly by russian agents who took down a large part of the grid for 24 hours or something like that our grid is vulnerable the way to minimize the threat is all of the good housekeeping cyber security practices that you would use anywhere else but you have to remember that you're not just protecting your your data center or your centralized resources you can't put a firewall around the whole grid it's all over the place so you have to have other ways of protecting it in the field and it can be anything from encryption to roles that people are allowed to play and encryption of data at rest and encryption data in motion physical barriers are really important there was someone in san jose california a few years ago with a gun shooting at a big transformer and at the time people started saying you know if you took out 27 major transformers in the us electric grid you would bring down the entire grid for the whole united states and so here was somebody shooting at these things they probably didn't damage them because they didn't have a high power enough rifle but physical security of all of the facilities is critical and all of the other cyber security tools that you do we actually have a project where we're looking at the impacts of these distributed grids where everyone has a smart meter and there's internet of things all over the grid and how someone could come in and for instance take over my smart meter and the transmissions that i'm sending back to spoof and the grid operator thinks it's me but it's really someone that's taken over my account and sending bad information and if someone were doing that with a few thousand customers they could do a lot of damage put in a signal that i want more power and then not use it or if you had solar put in a signal that i have a lot of power to sell and then not have it available this kind of there's kind of endless possibilities for mischief and hacking on the grid and it's a huge responsibility of the the grid operators and everyone they work with to protect that because the the the results could be really devastating and professor desert we do have a couple more hands up do you have a few spare minutes to answer okay abhijit how about you go ahead hello professor abhijit hello abhijit i have a question regarding like when you show when you showed us that diagram block diagram of how uh energy get we get energy from solar panels from wind turbines as well as from energy production plants so like how about having that hybrid uh mechanism uh at the largest scale as well as at the uh like in person scale like at like if i am if i have a house and i have this kind of technology mechanism with me then in in the times like having the natural calamities or any kind of problematic situation then instead of just like depending on one kind of renewable energy resources we can have like kind of have the natural resources as well but we'll use it whenever there is a need only so need-based kind of system so in that way can if we like implement hybrids energy mechanism at each and every house then will it like like minimize the energy production kind of issues that you just mentioned a couple of slides ago yeah so distribution of energy and kind of that path yeah so there's a couple elements of that so just having backup power you can buy your own diesel generator for if the power goes out big critical infrastructure systems like hospitals and fire stations often have backup power supplies um what's coming online now is more like what i think you're calling a hybrid which is a combination of solar plus battery so if i have solar panels that can charge a battery then when the sun comes down or if the power goes out i have my battery and even if the power goes out on the grid i can separate from the grid and use my own solar that can be done by one house or one facility but can also be done by a larger group of buildings or even an entire university campus and it's called a microgrid and in that case the whole university or maybe it's a whole hospital complex can go off the grid and have its own solar and have its own backup power and can sustain itself sometimes for days or weeks without having any power from the grid so in new york state alone there are dozens of microgrid projects going on and a lot of them are in places like long island that i showed you in that first superstorm sandy were hit the hardest they went weeks without power and so they're building microgrids so that if the main power lines go down for weeks they'll still have their own power they'll have their solar and their batteries maybe they'll have some diesel backup or whatever it is maybe they'll be able to keep on functioning as individuals or as institutions could i yeah i think we'll have a final question from abu good morning professor dj my name is abu i'm a couple hot take questions my first is is it smart to create a smart grid in cities that are prone to natural disasters and my second is how can students get involved in like what are some best approaches to relaying information to local legislators to implement smart smart city technologies um yeah so so first question i say yeah that's you want the smart grid in cities that are vulnerable probably more than in other cities they may take a different form or have different emphasis so um focusing on outage recovery having a very robust outage recovery system because you know a hurricane comes along and takes down power lines there's going to be outages and the faster you can get them repaired the better so that might be your focus in a vulnerable area um you may also want to this isn't so much smart it's kind of a physical brute force approach but putting power lines underground so you don't have these poles with power lines that get blown down and get flooded um it's what they call hardening the grid and so it's putting the grid on the ground so it's not as vulnerable to these disasters um and also the these are places where microgrids make sense so that if a power line goes down in one part of the city or there's an outage in one part of the city other parts of the city can go on on their micro grid and still have power so yeah so in these vulnerable places i think we saw with houston which is always vulnerable to hurricanes they happen all the time in that area so the investments they made really paid off when they got hit by that huge storm so so yeah it's it is really important um in vulnerable areas and smart grid would probably take certain forms also in those vulnerable areas that would make sense uh and your second question was getting in touch with um political leaders or or um politicians in terms of encouraging them to to adopt smart grid right um so there are certain people who have influence over these decisions so one group is the public utilities commission uh in new york state that's actually called the public service commission and they make a lot of decisions about what gets done and what gets approved and what doesn't get approved so you can reach out to them there's ways to if there's a case coming up that you can ask to be heard on that case you know that you can they'll give a time of comment and you can write a letter and have your voice heard in that in that process and they do respond i mean they might respond to one letter but if they're getting a number of letters from people with it or emails or whatever that are concerned about this issue um that can have an impact the other group that's important is the legislature so the public utility commission is making decisions but they're also making they're also implementing decisions that the legislature makes so the new york legislature the new york state legislature created something called reforming the energy vision came after that hurricane sandy they realized hey we've got a big problem here we really have to do something differently so they've been building out a new kind of grid and you know i won't go into all the details of it you can you can look it up if you're interested but a grid that's more decentralized and more distributed and more reliable and more resilient and also able to handle higher levels of solar and wind power without getting too much of that duck curve so the legislature itself which makes policy and has money to spend in the public utilities commission which makes decisions on specific projects and specific proposals are probably the places where you can have the most impact does that make sense is that what you were asking about yeah that was brilliant and i have a place to start thank you very much great i do think we have to wrap up there so i want to thank professor dedrick for his time for his presentation today and his willingness to answer our questions i also want to thank everyone else for joining us and asking those questions so again thank you all for your time thank you professor dedrick please keep a lookout for our future kind of iterations of our iSchool insights sessions if you didn't get to ask a question today or if you have other questions related to iSchool i'm putting my email address in the chat box though i'm sure many of you have received emails from me before please feel free to send me an email with those questions if i can answer them myself i will if not i will make sure i get them to you yeah and here's my email information if you're interested in since i won't be physically on the lab for a little while um you can you can contact us if you're interested in working on a project or just talking about what we're doing you know i was happy to involve students so if any of this is interested you or you have questions or are interested in the lab just shoot me an email and we'll have a talk we'll get on zoom and can have a little more discussion thank you thank you again professor dedrick and thank you all for joining us so we'll speak to you soon all right my pleasure