The Grid of 2054, Today: Grid IQ Insight Uses Futuristic Tech to Detect Today’s Outages

What do Twitter updates, NASA's tree-spotting satellite, and special effects from a Tom Cruise thriller have in common with the utility poles outside your house? A lot, it turns out. They can all pitch in to keep your lights on.

GE just rolled out a new grid management system that harvests gigabytes of diverse data from social media, smart meters, the weather service, the U.S. census and other sources to help power companies predict and prevent electrical outages. Just as Tom Cruise did in the futuristic action drama Minority Report, the system allows utility workers to manipulate the information with their hands – swiping through data like an orchestra conductor.

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The idea behind the system, which GE calls Grid IQ Insight, is to help utilities detect electricity outages faster and fix problems before they get out of hand. “Today, utilities by and large rely on customer calls to find power outages,” says Jonathan Garrity, product manager at GE Digital Energy. “We can interface with Twitter to complement customers calling in. For example, we can identify all tweets from a given geographic area that have key phrases like ‘power outage’.” The system corroborates the information with data from smart meters (more than 37 million have been installed in the U.S.), power equipment like transformers owned by the utility, and actual calls from customers.

Grid IQ Insight is one of GE's new Industrial Internet products. The Industrial Internet is a global network connecting people, machines and data. GE is investing $1 billion in Industrial Internet applications and products like Grid IQ Insight that have the potential to cut $150 billion in waste across major industries like aviation, oil & gas, healthcare and energy by improving asset management and productivity and lowering maintenance costs.


There are other Grid IQ Insight applications besides spotting outages. “Vegetation management is a huge challenge for utilities,” Garrity says. “One of the companies we work with spends $70 million a year trimming trees. By combining outage, weather and satellite data we can make vegetation management more targeted, improving reliability and keeping these costs low.”

The glut of data calls for powerful data management. That's why GE engineers co-opted the same technology used by Netflix to stream movies. The system, called Apache Cassandra, was originally developed by Facebook for fast inbox searching. “It allows for higher availability and more efficient querying of our data sets,” Garrity says.

Individual customers can also benefit from Grid IQ Insight's analytics. For example, many families that invested in solar panels can’t tell exactly how much power they are generating and how much money they are saving. Now they can log in to their utility’s website and monitor in detail their power usage and generation. “You can see the return on investment on your roof-top solar panel,” Garrity says. “Grid IQ Insight will also know when your solar panels are not putting out as much electricity as they’ve been in the past. Maybe one of them is broken or needs to be cleaned.”

Cruise’s Minority Report is set in 2054. But intelligent energy management is already here.

Carbon Sink: The Solution to Carbon Capture May Be Hiding in Your Bathroom

First the good news. Carbon dioxide emissions from coal have been falling over the last five years in the U.S., hitting the lowest point for any quarter since 1986 in March 2012. Cheap natural gas allowed utilities to cut back on coal, the most “carbon-intense” fossil fuel used for power generation. But coal-fired power plants are not going away anytime soon in the U.S., and countries like China and India, which already burn half of the world’s coal, are leading in building new ones.

That’s why Robert Perry, and scientists like him, are developing new kinds of traps that stop carbon from escaping through the smokestack. Perry, a chemist at GE Global Research, has been experimenting with materials normally found in bathrooms and laundry rooms, like shampoo conditioners and textile softeners.

Lather, rinse, repeat: Perry is using compounds normally found in bathrooms and laundry rooms to trap carbon dioxide.

Perry employs the materials, which chemists call aminosilicones, like a conveyor belt. They efficiently glom on to CO2 gas at about 105 F and release CO2 after heating the mixture to 250 F. The system then cools down the aminosilicone and it returns to trap more gas.

Unlike conventional carbon capture methods, Perry’s process doesn’t need any water. Which is where the money is. “If you need to boil water to drive off the CO2, you are facing an enormous energy drain,” he says. “The existing technology will increase your cost of electricity by 80 percent. You almost have to build a plant that’s twice as large to power the scrubber and send electricity to the consumer.” Perry and his team has filed several patents for their method.

The U.S. Department of Energy wants to bring the electricity cost of CO2 capture no higher than 35 percent above what it costs now, but Perry says that “anyone who can get under 50 percent might be doing really well.”

He is now moving from beakers and tubes in his lab to a new 15-foot apparatus where his team can harvest engineering data to validate their models. He is also already looking at “near-term” applications at cement plants, steel mills, and small power plants.

What about the gas? Perry says that it can be used for oil and natural gas extraction, and also to grow plants. In the Netherlands, for example, farmers are using a CO2-enriched atmosphere to enhance the growth of vegetables and tulips. Now, that’s green energy.

Brine Science: How Salt and Ingenuity Purify Water for Thousands in Asia and Africa

Early last summer, Sister Mary Ethel Parrot dropped by the office of WaterStep, a Louisville charity fighting waterborne disease around the world, and picked up a pair of tote bags filled with tubing, clamps and other plastic parts. The nun took them on a plane to Uganda, where she had set up a boarding school for girls.

In Africa, Sister Mary Ethel, who is also a trained physicist, helped assemble the kits into a pair of ingenious mini water-treatment systems that look like a cross between a tea kettle and a bicycle pump. The devices use ordinary salt and electricity from a car battery to produce chlorine gas that kills germs in water for 600 African students and nuns at the Sisters of Notre Dame School and convent in rural Uganda. “In Uganda they can get their hands on salt, but not much more,” says Steve Froelicher, an engineer at GE Appliances in Louisville who helped design the system. “With salt, a car battery and some solar panels you could be making clean water for years.”

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A Teaching Moment: Students at the Sisters of Notre Dame School in Uganda listen to Sister Mary Ethel Parrot explain electrolysis.
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Carpe Sodium: The school collects rain water in large barrels and purifies it with ingenious chlorine generators using salt and car battery.
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Froelicher and his colleague Sam DuPlessis led a group of GE volunteers who together with WaterStep designed the device last year. The system runs electric current between two electrodes through a water solution of sodium chloride, a.k.a. table salt. The electrolysis breaks up the salt molecules and frees bubbles of chlorine gas from the brine.

Since its launch at Louisville’s IdeaFestival last September, WaterStep shipped 165 units to Pakistan, India, Kenya and elsewhere. DuPlessis says that the devices are already purifying water for over 127,000 people. They include neighbors of Wesley Korir, winner of the 2012 Boston Marathon, who brought the device to his hometown Kitali, Kenya.

But the Louisville the team is far from finished. DuPlessis and Froelicher are working to reduce the system’s power demand below 30 watts and use solar panels instead of a car battery as the source of electricity. “This lower power level will allow us to use a solar cell alone or with a much smaller battery,” Froelicher says. “We can also eliminate some expensive components while making the system easier and faster to set up.” The GE Foundation has made a grant to WaterStep to manufacture new tooling and lower production costs. Froelicher says that plastic injection molds would make manufacturing simpler, cut costs per unit by $40, and reduce overhead and logistics associated with moving parts for machining.

In Uganda, the devices are already catching and purifying water from large steel barrels that collect rain water running off roofs. They also providing a hands-on chemistry lesson. The nuns in Uganda are using the chlorine generators to teach their students how electrolysis works.