IEEE Spectrum June, 2014 - 59

water shutdowns. In tall buildings, elderly
people were trapped on high floors because the elevators stopped working."
And so Kashiwanoha's electricity system
is designed to provide uninterrupted service to critical systems like elevators, water
pumps, and hospitals in the event of an
emergency. To do that, it relies on several
battery storage sites as well as a microgrid,
which facilitates the sharing of electricity
and can operate in isolation
of the main grid. A command
center on the second floor of
a hotel and apartment building oversees the microgrid
and tracks exactly where
electricity is being consumed
and generated. During normal operation, customers are
also encouraged to track their
own energy usage through
touch-screen monitors in
their homes and businesses.
Those who do an especially
good job of reducing their
consumption are awarded
"eco points," which they can
exchange for goods and services at the local LaLaPort
shopping center.
Eventually, says Tobe,
more home automation will
be added, like sensors that
automatically turn off lights
when the curtains are opened. Healthcare monitoring will also be offered, to
track things like how much exercise you
get and how many calories you eat. People who move to Kashiwanoha realize
that the city represents a break with the
past, says Tobe. "Their mind-set is that
they're establishing a new culture, and
they're highly motivated to participate
in making life better."

be replicated? "A good electricity future
will depend on every new technology
you can think of," says EPRI's Gellings.
"Energy storage, device efficiency, better ways to mine coal and extract natural
gas, grid sensors, more advanced generation." Should any one of these technologies not progress in the way that experts
now assume they will, it could throw a
wrench in the works, he says. Regulators

"a good
electricity
future will
depend on
every new
technology
you can
think of"

Assuming ThAT forwArd-looking
cities like Fort Collins and Kashiwanoha
reach their energy goals, can that success

and policymakers will also need to be convinced to make the hefty investments in
infrastructure that a smarter integrated
grid will require.
Even if all these changes come to pass,
the grid in 2064 will still look a lot like
today's grid in some key ways. Big coal
plants, for instance, will remain a large
part of the energy mix. According to the
U.S. Energy Information Administration's
International Energy Outlook 2013, the
United States, Australia, and many other
countries will retire their aging coal plants,
but other countries will continue to build
new ones. China, already the world's lead-

ing coal user, will add about 530 gigawatts
of coal-fired power capacity by 2040, the
report projects. And so coal's share of
electricity generation worldwide in 2040
will likely be just a few percentage points
below what it was in 2010.
And once those new plants come on
line, they'll be hard to budge. "This is a
very inertial field," says Vaclav Smil, who's
studied the slow pace of change in the
power industry. "A single power plant
costs like a billion dollars to build. Once
you put it in place, you don't want to tear
it out and start again. So innovation will
happen mainly at the margins."
Innovation at the margins could still
lead to profound changes in the future
grid, if cities like Fort Collins and Kashiwanoha get it right. Fifty years from now,
says Steve Catanach, manager of light
and power at Fort Collins Utilities, the
two coal-fired plants from which the city
draws 80 percent of its electricity will no
longer be active. Taking their place will
be new combined-cycle gas turbines but
also a larger share of distributed generation. These days, the utility is actively encouraging investments in wind and solar
through a new feed-in tariff, which will let
customers sell their electricity back to the
grid at a guaranteed rate. Greater use of
demand-response mechanisms will allow
customers to curtail their usage during
times of peak demand. And when energy
storage becomes affordable, Catanach
adds, "we'll use that to balance the variability of the renewables."
While some industry experts are wringing their hands over the looming "death
spiral" for today's utilities, Catanach manages to sound optimistic about what's
to come. "Fort Collins is a great place
to live, and the lights are always on," he
says. He's pretty sure that 50 years from
now, people will still be able to say the
same thing. n
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2014