A Quick Primer on how the US Grid Works
The electric grid is complex and I haven’t seen a simple explanation of it yet.
At Singularity we’re solving the problem of navigating a confusing industry to give you simple insights into carbon emissions via energy usage. This article gives you a taste for how complicated the industry is.
quick note: If you’re an industry expert, this article is not for you. There are many missing details and simplifications here.
The grid is a complicated system that delivers electricity to you as soon as you request it. It works without fail (mostly) and has to work for a few hundred million people in the US all at the same time. Ever wondered what it’s made of and how all the pieces fit together? In this article, I’m going to explain (at a high level) how energy gets to your home and how we’re analyzing it at Singularity Energy.
The Actors
Who are the different players in the grid operation and what are their jobs? Let’s take a look:
- the consumer: this is you and me. We consume the energy on an end-user level by flipping our light switch when we get home. We’ll call this energy consumption.
- the utility: this is the company that the consumer pays in order to have energy provided to their home. We’ll call this level of moving energy around the grid energy distribution.
- the generator: this is the plant that does some chemical or mechanical process to convert potential or mechanical energy into electricity. Or, to say it like a normal person: they’ll do anything from burning coal or capturing wind to plug electricity into our power lines. We’ll refer to this as energy generation.
- the balancing authority (BA): in the US, these highly regulated entities are called Independent System Operators (ISOs) or Region Transmission Operators (RTOs). The differences between ISOs and RTOs are subtle, so I call everybody an ISO (or a BA if I’m talking to somebody in the industry). These are the key players. The BAs will “balance” the energy in a region. They’re responsible for: predicting the electricity consumption, telling which plants to be on at what time, deciding where and when to import/export energy within their region and to neighboring BAs, and (most importantly) deciding the price of energy on the wholesale market. The wholesale market is where your utility buys their energy. We’ll call managing energy at this level energy transmission.
Here’s a simple diagram to illustrate the relationships:
The diagram, while simplified, shows the boundaries of the different players that make the grid work. We, the consumer, are black. We get power distributed from our utility (in green). The utility gets power transmitted from the regional BA (in blue), who ultimately gets energy from the generators (in red).
The generators are told by the BA when to turn on and off, since the BA has a prediction of the energy consumption. When the BA gets the energy, they transmit it to the utility who needs energy at that time. The utility then distributes the energy to you. This all seems pretty well measured and coordinated. So what happens when things don’t go according to plan? What happens when we use more energy than the BA predicted?
In this case, the BA has generators on standby. They are ready to kick energy generation up a few notches when necessary. When the BA sees that demand is higher than they predicted, they tell the plants on standby to turn it up. These are the marginal fuels of the region, and usually it’s only 1 or 2 types of fuel sources at a time. In New England, for example, it switches throughout the day between natural gas and wind power.
What does Singularity care about all this?
At Singularity, we’re building products that give insight into the grid’s carbon intensity. The BAs in the US are highly regulated. Part of that regulation is that they need to provide their data to the public. Since we care about measuring real-time carbon on the grid, we pull what’s called the generated fuel mix (genfuelmix) from the ISO. This tells us what fuels are being used at what time. We combine that with the EPA emission data to measure carbon emissions in real time. We use this to tell you that, for example, at 11:25am last Wednesday 1 megawatt hour of energy emitted 283 pounds of CO2. Whereas, if you had that much energy 20 minutes later, it would’ve emitted 791 pounds of CO2. We call this measurement the “carbon intensity” of the grid.
Since the BAs import/export energy between regions, we need to integrate with all of them to get a clear picture of the grid. Here’s a (somewhat dated) picture of the different BAs in the USA and Canada:
We pull the genfuelmix from the BAs as often as they post them. We run real-time analysis and forecasting on that data. The end result is an accurate, consistent reading of the real-time (and historical) carbon intensity for a region.
Interested in carbon data?
In a few weeks, we’ll be launching the beta version of our data platform. After gathering feedback for a while, we found people are most interested in getting this data if they’re:
- consulting for a company to be a leader in sustainability
- drafting legislation that aims to enable meaningful actions to reduce emissions
- participating in ESG investment
- doing research on the emissions of the US grid
- building a carbon-aware application (e.g. visualizing carbon emissions, controlling thermostats, electric vehicle charging, etc.), or
- just curious about grid data
this could be an invaluable tool.
Please reach out to me if you think you know somebody who would want access to this data! 🌳
If you’re curious about how the grid data looks and how we get it, check out the follow up to this post.
Interested in learning more about the past, present, and future of the US grid? I highly recommend The Grid by Gretchen Bakke.
