Over the last few years the cost of electric power from TVA (via the Glasgow EPB) increased about 35%. Now it appears that, over the next six months, that cost will go up again by staggering amounts (as this is written TVA has not given us the final bad news, but it is likely that we will see an increase of something like 15% on October 1 and something very similar again on January 1, 2009) over the next six months. Add this to the stress we are already experiencing at the gas pumps and the crisis many of you will feel this winter as you see the unbelievable natural gas bills and the result is a gut-wrenching fear unlike anything we have ever seen before. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that it is now okay to go ahead and panic!

We have talked about the reasons for these dramatic increases several times before in this very blog. Drought in east Tennessee is drastically reducing the amount of cheap hydroelectric power TVA can produce. Increases in the cost of diesel fuel makes transporting coal from the mines to the coal-fired generation units much more expensive and that is driving up the cost of coal. China and India are using staggering amounts of coal and diesel fuel in their zeal to make cheap consumer goods for us to purchase at Wal Mart, and that is driving up the cost of both of those fuel sources. We hate to have this fact shoved in our faces, but the real culprit in these increases in the cost of all forms of energy is the way we live our lives. We use too much energy each and every day. In other words, we have found the enemy, and he is us.

As a Glasgow resident and a customer of the EPB you have something going for you that folks who buy their electric power elsewhere do not have . . . yet. For the last twenty years we have been developing a broadband network that touches each and every home and business in our community. For just as many years we have been planning to use that network to help our population use electricity in a totally different manner than the way we have taken for granted over the last eighty years. Even though our efforts have been discounted and ignored by TVA and the other elements of the electric power business in our country for most of those twenty years, it seems that the dawn is beginning to break over our landscape of ideas about infotricity.

Infotricity is a term we coined many years ago and it is meant to identify electric power, combined with a robust broadband network, as a totally different product. Electricity is something your home and business has been running on forever, but the decisions about how much and when it is used have been handed off to major appliances for the last several decades. Those appliances; air conditioners, water heaters, freezers, refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, clothes dryers, etc., have developed a very disturbing habit. They tend to wind up all running at the same time on hot afternoons like the ones outside right now. When they all get together and run at the same time it creates a demand for electricity that has a sharp spike (we call it a peak demand) that lasts from about 1:00 p.m. to about 7:00 p.m. on summer days. It is that peak demand that all power generation systems struggle to meet. Those peaks cause the most coal and natural gas to be burned. Those peak demands are the root cause for most of the large cost increases we are seeing for electricity.

By comparison, our plans for infotricity will chop the top off of those peak electricity power demands by using our broadband network to break up the habits of the appliances to work at the same time. Instead of the cheap thermostat that today controls your water heater, air conditioner, freezer, and refrigerator, we can use IP (Internet Protocol) commands to tame these appliances and turn their cacophony into a symphony!

Here is how it might work. Once our high speed network is connected to your home and when the home is retrofitted with new IP-based controls for the air conditioning, heating, water heating, etc., we could work with you to establish your temperature limits and living style and put all of that information into a server that is assigned the task of orchestrating the delivery of infotricity to your home. Then, every day as TVA determines what their mix of available generation is and what the likely temperature extremes for their service areas is going to be, their generation folks would transmit information to these “infotricity servers” which would, in turn, organize the temperature targets for your home and your appliances such that they do not contribute to TVA’s peak demand. The result might be that your home is “precooled” to a temperature cooler than normal in the morning while power demand is low so that your home can coast through the afternoon longer, and get a little warmer than you would normally like, in the pursuit of a flatter demand for power. As far as your other appliances go, well, so long as you have hot water when you want it and cold milk in your refrigerator, you really don’t care when the heating and cooling occurred, and infotricity would exploit that reality. In addition you would likely have additional reminders that you need to try to reduce your energy demand during peak periods. There will likely be a reminder in your email, information scrolling across your television screen, a red/green indicator near your washer and dryer, etc. All of this will be focused at reminding you that infotricity is far less expensive than electricity and that you need to participate by cutting back your consumption during the peak times.

Technology like this will allow TVA to offset the construction of new power plants made of concrete and steel and fueled with coal, natural gas, or enriched uranium with virtual power plants made of fiber optic cables and IP addressable appliances and fueled with a flow of bits, bytes, and intelligence. In effect, even though your home will not look any different, if you participate in this new world of infotricity, you will have a piece of a massive infotricity generator in your home. The technology, coupled with your willingness to respond to signals, will form the basis for the cleanest and most sustainable method ever devised for the generation of electric power. This is an earthshaking (maybe an earth-saving) idea and, the really cool thing is, it has been developed right here in Glasgow. We are optimistic that TVA is about to start working closely with us to further our development of this idea such that it begins to provide real power to their generation fleet within a couple of years.

These same ideas will work for businesses and industrial customers just as well as they will work at our homes. The secret to better living through infotricity is in learning how to use energy during the hours when it is abundant and less during the hours when it is in short supply. It is really just that simple. This is also the only way that electric cars will ever really fit into our total energy solution. Electric cars are a great idea so long as we can make sure that folks are not trying to charge them during the hours of peak demand. If plug-in cars arrive and if we are not prepared to charge them with infotricity, they will only compound our energy problem instead of improving it. But, once again, Glasgow is in a perfect position to take advantage of this technology when it is available.

In summary, things are bad, but not as bad here. We have ignored the simple fact that all energy resources are finite and we have been doing that for many years. While we have been ignoring facts, the population of the world has doubled and a lot of the new residents have decided they want to use their share of our energy resources as well. Now we have to pay more to keep them from using the energy we Americans had come to see as exclusively ours. Most communities find themselves virtually helpless to do anything about this situation, but Glasgow has been planning for this problem for twenty years. While we cannot tell you to relax and not worry about it, we can tell you that we have ideas and plans, and you are going to have options. These options will not be painless and they will not allow us to continue to be oblivious to reality, but they do give us hope for a sustainable energy future that is better than many of our neighbors can expect, at least for a while.

Even though many of the stars and planets are difficult to see from downtown Glasgow through our man-made veil of street lights, enough of them are visible during my nightly dog-walking excursions to create a breathtaking display. However, of late it seems that each visible body in the heavens simply represents one of the problems we face as a society. There are thousands of personal crises, mine, yours, and our neighbor’s, to be represented yet only known by the individuals staggering under the weight of those problems. There are issues related only to our little community of Glasgow. There are statewide and regional problems to be assigned their own stars as well. Finally, there are nationwide and worldwide matters that also must be represented in our night sky. Taken all together, there are then thousands of stars in our night sky of issues.

As an engineer, it is impossible for me to look upon heavens full of problems without proposing a solution that might, at least, extinguish the glow of a large number of those troubles. Twenty years ago we proposed a grand solution to many of Glasgow’s problems when we started construction of the first municipally owned broadband network in the U.S. That solution has worked well for many of our problems in Glasgow, but now we dream of expanding upon what we have learned here to further enhance our network in Glasgow while solving problems for our state and our region.

Here is what we mean. Many of the problems in our present night sky are related to energy. The cost of electric power, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel fuel are spiraling upward and that is impacting everything in our lives. TVA is increasing electric power rates and promising more of the same in the future as they struggle to build new generating plants to meet the growing demand for electric power. The numbers are staggering. They are about 2,000 megawatts short of the capacity they need right now to meet their demand ( a megawatt is equal to 1,000 kilowatts and the average home in Glasgow requires about 10 kilowatts of capacity, so, a megawatt would serve about 100 Glasgow homes). They are looking to nuclear power for the new generation units since the outlook for additional coal-fired generation is murky, at best. They project the cost of building new nuclear units at somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 per kilowatt. So, by their own figures, the project expenditures of more than $18 billion over the next ten years to add the capacity they need.

At a recent meeting of TVA officials and the distributors of TVA power, these figures were discussed along with some preliminary plans for actually reducing our demand for electric power, I had an opportunity to compare what we know about building advanced broadband networks to the amount of money TVA is looking to spend over the next ten years on concrete, steel, and nuclear reactor vessels. The comparison ignited a blinding flash of inspiration in which I saw a single thread connecting many of our problems. That thread is a fiber optic cable and here is how I think it could solve our problems.

We are doing a test project in Glasgow wherein a portion of our old coaxial cable-based broadband plant is being converted to the latest fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) configuration. In a FTTH network, all the cable television, telephone, internet, and electric metering information coming to and from your home is carried via light waves. This means that the capacity and speed of the data traveling to and from the home is virtually unlimited. We think this is the be-all and end-all network configuration that will serve the homes connected to it for twenty, or more, years without fear of obsolescence. Further, our experience shows that this advanced network can be accomplished for about $2,000 per home connected. Keep that number in your head.

Now let’s return to TVA’s forecast of $2,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt for new nuclear generation capacity. In fact, to be abundantly conservative, let’s assume (and this is a very far reaching assumption for any TVA project) that they can build new capacity for $2,000 per kilowatt. That would mean that they are willing to pay the same thing per kilowatt of new capacity as we know it would cost to establish FTTH broadband to a home. If they are looking at spending $18 billion that same money would get FTTH to nine million homes. Curiously, that is about the total number of customers TVA serves over the seven state region. Stay with me on this.

If TVA had an unlimited capacity data connection to every home, they could use that connection to control thermostats on heating, air conditioning, water heating, freezers, refrigerators, washing machines, clothes dryers, dishwashers, etc. That sort of control would easily allow them to shave one, probably two, likely even three to four kilowatts of demand off of their peak demand. So, spending that money on broadband networks for every home and business in the Tennessee Valley region would likely double or triple the capacity improvement they are looking to get through building new nuclear plants! So, if they built FTTH instead of more reactor vessels, they would be increasing their net capacity by actually reducing demand during peak times. Since this same amount of money would double or triple the net capacity impact that they anticipate by simply building more units, they could actually shut down a filthy coal unit or two instead! There is no more earth friendly way to add capacity to an electric system than by acting to reduce demand. No new fuel is needed for this solution. No new operating costs are added. No future nuclear fuel disposal costs are added. This is the most “green” energy that exists. At the same time, everyone would get an advanced broadband connection with infinite capacity and speed for free! In addition, widespread use of broadband could have meaningful impact on the use of other fuels. More shopping on-line, more telecommuting, more movement of the message instead of the messenger would reduce other forms of energy consumption and all of these reductions would bring immediate benefits to the region.

What would our region look like with nine million homes connected to a robust FTTH network? Well, for starters employment would skyrocket. Folks would be needed in all sorts of manufacturing plants to make the cables, electronics, hardware, and software to provide all of the plant necessary to accomplish this undertaking. Scores of folks would go to work building the networks. Hundreds of cities and towns in our region connected with FTTH would also bring all sorts of new businesses. Major internet retailers would want to locate servers in our region to tap the wealth of bandwidth. With those businesses would come software and hardware engineers and the corresponding increased demand for an educated workforce. True, the construction of new nuclear plants would employ a lot of folks as well. But the FTTH solution would spread that employment across hundreds of cities and towns instead of one or two sites. In fact, the FTTH solution would more closely mimic the model of TVA itself as TVA would, once again, be extending the latest technology to every home and business throughout the multi-state region. TVA would be back in the business of democratizing technology – making it cheap and available to all. The heady days of the late 30's and 40's could return to our region.

Of course, this solution to so many of our problems would also create a few political problems. Very rich companies like AT&T and Comcast and other well entrenched monopolies would howl in protest. Those howls would be eerily reminiscent of the chorus of howls that private power companies offered up to Congress as Senator George Norris fought to create TVA in the first place. Private power companies were adamantly opposed to TVA building out electric power networks and replacing the private 12 cent kilowatt-hours with public 3 cent kilowatt-hours. Still, TVA was created and the history of electric power for all came with it.

But that was 1933 and we had leaders like George Norris, Franklin Roosevelt, David Lilienthal, and others who could care less if the rich ceased to get richer. In those days they saw the sky full of different problem-stars. They included an unruly Tennessee River, a depressed region of the United States, land that had been depleted of its agricultural value through greedy deforestation, short life spans due to back-breaking manual labor in the absence of electric power, and the need for a way to produce defense products through use of the natural resources of the region. They saw all of those problems and crafted an unusual solution aimed at making improvements in all of them. George Norris, who brought TVA into existence 75 years ago this April saw the democratization of technology through a government entity like TVA as a natural role of government. He convinced Franklin Roosevelt that one means by which democracy could combat the forces of entrenched and organized greed is through the use of government. “A government,” Norris said, “in the truest sense is only a method to bring to humanity the greatest amount of happiness.” It seems to me that TVA could bring happiness to nine millions homes more effectively with ubiquitous FTTH networks than with a few more nuclear reactors.

But George Norris is gone, and with him most of the leadership that might share this idea for a better method to solve our electric power, employment, development, and broadband network problems, and that is a shame. Shortly after having this vision we shared it with a couple of the members of the present TVA management team and their yawns were deafening. So, we seem to be headed toward a continuation of the present momentum to consume more than we have the capacity to provide and to saddle the people of the region with increasing debt and energy costs when there is such an elegant solution right in front of us. Still, when I look up into the sky tonight, I will still see that thread of possibility connecting the dots of so many of our problems and wonder why we fight so hard to keep the fires of discontent burning. I wonder what George Norris would have thought of this idea.