Reframing the Electricity Grid Problem:
How to Organize the Energy Economy

If we step back and view the electrical power grid’s job description and the country’s electrical power requirements, there is a significant mismatch between the two that presents a great opportunity.  The currency of the grid is alternating current (AC) which is a key to its role as the delivery chute for power that needs to travel long distances.   How we each use electricity, on the other hand, is predominately in electronic devices which consume direct current (DC).  This reality has led to the creation of the ubiquitous AC to DC converter, also known as a “power supply”, or for our laptops “the brick”.

These converters consume energy and are most of time out of site inside the product like a TV or a desktop computer.  People are a little more conscious of these power supplies when they are outside the appliance, crowding up our power strips like a slum of heat, dust and awkward design.  In either case, these devices are low cost and inefficient: nearly always below 80% efficiency and often as bad as 60% efficient (meaning 20% to 40% of the power we pay for to supply the appliance is lost).

How we, as a society, incorporate into our grid two of the most important trends of our time can either moderate or exacerbate this problem.  These trends are: the increasing use of distributed clean renewable energy; and, the run-away growth of electronics in our lives. 

Because both of these power generating and power consuming technologies are denominated in DC, we need to plug them into the same DC network that is established in our buildings.  Of course there needs to be a point on that network where the AC grid communicates to the location (and gets converted to DC for that local gird), but the loss-producing conversions that number in the billions must stop.  If you are fond of thinking of Green Buildings as Smart Buildings then think of this:  just as a desktop computer has a single power supply at the wall that makes DC out of the AC delivered to it, so should we and let the DC domain prevail inside.  Two huge coincidental benefits that flow from this more rational design are better economics for distributed power sources like solar PV and the better use of stored electricity – also only denominated in DC.

Recognizing this urgent need, Nextek Power Systems has invented this point of connectivity between the two worlds of man-made electricity, the AC and the DC, and created the first router for power that intelligently manages the grid, the local DC network and stored power to smooth out the bumps in the road.