Transcript

Powering Progress: Smart Infrastructure and The Future of Cities: Massoud Amin at TEDxUMN

[Music] [Applause] have you ever seen a village without electricity have you ever seen a city a major city during a blackout the image you're seeing up on the screen is what I witnessed my parents were medical doctors and they would do volunteer work outside of my hometown tab Iran Northwestern part of Iran we would go to Villages that had no electricity in them 20 M away from major cities that in the city the quality of life was in comparison was similar to going to Athens or to Rome you would drive to 20 mi the quality of life would drop a century or more and the soil was so cracked that couldn't bring any Harvest to the farmers women would die trying to give birth to their children and this is giving you a picture of what that was that I took as an 11year old as soon as they would get electricity they could drag they could dig much deeper wells bring water up and that would transform everything access to electricity meant a jump in the quality of life and economic well-being of the Society showing you the next picture is the very first day a pump that my parents donated to this Village what it looked like again the land was a parched land cracked soil nothing was growing and here I am playing as an 11-year-old excited by potential that electrification rural electrification brought to this one Village and one harvest season right after this this is what it look like so I decided early on that electricity and power and automation bringing life bringing opportunity is critical to everything we do even medicine clean water depends on electricity my second week in America as a teenager as a 16 year old to going to attend high school in New York was the New York City blackout this is July 13th and 14th 1977 the whole fabric of society collapsed there were riots more than 3,800 arrests led to the AER of the mayor and mayor edcot was elected in the aftermath of this major blackout blame on a lightning strike the city of 9 million was completely done dark and these are the pictures of the riots and that evening during sunset the whole city was black so in one part of the world I saw cities or Villages without electricity on the other side I saw amazing City without electricity and how the social fabric of it collapses so I saw a system in need of protection and Improvement and that system critically depended on reliable electricity in the years that followed I worked on electrification and how to make our electric networks and infrastructure critical infrastructure smarter more resilient and more efficient when we look globally on the entire picture of the Earth at night you will see the networks of electrification on top of these networks we develop everything else one of them is our economies what would you expect the GDP the wealth of Nations the propagation of wealth where do you think those are centered around they're centered exactly in areas that are affordable available and high degree of electrification to look at this from a broader picture as we project forward we currently have 19 cities with 10 million or more people in them but by 2020 there are going to be 30 such cities by 2050 60 such mega cities currently there are 1.2 billion people in the world that have no access to electricity another 1.4 billion have inadequate access they have aages of 4 hours or longer per day in order to bring electricity to still assuming 40% of the population of the world has diminished access to electricity we still need to Triple the amount of generation so when you think ahead tonight this evening one of the key things I want you to consider is the impact the footprint that we develop using our energy resources and how we approach that in particular I want to leave you with one of the Nuggets is when you look at electrification and you look at how we have harvested our energy resources hunter gatherers used about 2500 calories per day The Agrarian Society about 10,000 calories per day per person currently Us in the more developed parts of the world use anywhere from 50,000 calories a day everything we use iPhones iPads computers Transportation up to over 600,000 calories per day however our approach to our energy resources are very similar to hunter gatherers we drill a hole exhaust the resources of that hole move on to the next move on to the next move on to the next so we need to evolve to a higher level of energy harvesting and energy utilization in addition if we step back and we think about environmental security Economic Security and National Security at the Nexus of all three is energy security there are no silver bullets but there are many Innovation bullets and I'm going to share some of them with you in particular it is not worthy that in 2000 a blue ribbon panel at the National Academy of engineering ranked the top 20 greatest achievement of the 20th century you would have expected television rapid Transportation internet or man going to the Moon to be especially because Neil Armstrong was the chair of this Blue Ribbon commission but what do you think they selected networks of electrification without the grid we could have not done any of the above and we always take it for granted and it's the whole system of generation to the end Ed to the delivery the middle part is the transmission and distribution this amazing system this Marvel of engineering is under a lot of stress the outages cost our economy in the United States somewhere between $80 billion a year to $187 billion a year in an average year it cost us about 150 B billion dollars a year in spoilage loss productivity and other economic impacts when we look ahead for the next 10 20 30 years what we currently have in North America is 450,000 miles of 100,000 volts and higher what we call 100 KV or higher which is the backbone as we look ahead and we think about where the resources are for energy security for environmental security for Economic Security to meet the three objectives we are going to need a stronger and smarter grid what do I mean by stronger grid the 450,000 miles of high voltage lines need to be strengthened by adding another 9% about 42,000 miles to bring electrons from homegrown sources such as wind solar geothermal biomass what you seeing behind me on the map this assessment has been done by the department of energy by my former organization the Electric Power Research Institute this would enable integration of about 40% of energy coming from wind and introduces the most efficient carrier of energy by the way what do you think it is is it hydrogen is it biofuels is it U liquid fuels or are they electrons the most efficient carrier of energy electrons are the most efficient carrier of energy energy that's why we need this electrification to bring it for from where the sources are to where the demands are and the high voltage transmission by the way is 97% efficient 97% efficiency so Tesla's original dream was correct so how do you make it smarter what's the overlay of sensors communication ways to make the system more resilient and smarter I'm going to share with you a quick background of an F-15 fighter plane that I had the privilege of working on so in 1983 Captain zv an Israeli pilot was doing air combat Maneuvers against a an F4 a phantom both aircraft were built by mcdonal Douglas now boing Phantom Works in St Louis so they had a m Collision Captain zie lost about 90% of his right wing he is a great pilot he Landed It using engine thrust you have seen it in movies trust vectoring he landed at twice the nominal landing speed of an F-15 he turned the aircraft into a missile and by doing that he could control the aircraft usually when a collision of this type happens you lose symmetry so you cannot Glide the aircraft and the the aircraft flips and Falls Like a Rock but here the gentleman was really really fast and really lucky because we tested it put it through wind tunel test in St Louis and found out he had a very narrow slice of stability stable flight envelope in which he could control the aircraft so when that happened he landed the aircraft there are no rear view mirrors in an F-15 he looked to his right and he said holy cow I had no idea there was this much damage otherwise I would have done what the F4 Pilots did and I would have parachuted to safety without saving the aircraft but when human being one human being makes such a difference in a such a complex system guess what people ask if a human being can do it can you develop an automatic system that quickly sens as what's going on reconfigures the system and saves commercial passenger as well as fighter ples so the good news is NASA and McDonald Douglas funded the work I had the privilege of being a principal investigator on this and it founded two of my Al students and two Master students after 5 years we develop a system that could quickly identify what's going on within a fraction of a second and compensate for the damage we never cut the wing off of an F-15 but we did 15 flight actual flight test in naso Dy and Southern California including complete hydraulic failure when you lose hydraulic you lose the ability to control the aircraft and here here is a lateral stick input with complete hydraulic failure and the red line is showing you how he controlled it we applied the same principle to power grids and to not power grids fuel supply power grids and Telecom Network on top of them layers of infrastructure we model different parts of the nation infrastructure and quick pop quiz for you what's the best way if you think of the the brown boxes a portion of the infrastructure that we have mathematical models for what's the best way to control it is it a Soviet model which is the centralized K in the middle that monitors everything it's a bird's I and does everything or is it coordinated among the different control or automation entities or is it totally decentralized what do you think is the best way to control the system it's a false question it's actually all three at the lowest level very fast and the motivation for this we did I did for the western United States over 960,000 simulations to evolve this architecture and for the eastern part of United States over 1.6 million because it's tightly coupled and you need to find a way to decipher what's going on in the system the architecture that emerged has three layers at the lowest level is really really fast in the order of fraction of a second mid layer does a lot of coordination it's in the order of hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds top level that those forecasting strategically knowing what's coming is actually centralized so whenever I present this and there's a neuroscientist in the room said massud this is the same way the human brain operates at the lowest the earliest part of the brain the the way it was evolved it is The Reptilian Brain is really quick fast reaction mid level of the brain the mamian brain that all mammals have that layer is more emotions and coordination and so on the top level the new cortex The Spar brain is very logical and strategic and so on so we didn't know this it came out of repeated simulations and subjecting systems to adversity does this work here is a nonsensitive example of it this is the Western United States on the lower right hand on the lower left hand side you're seeing Southern California on the top you're seeing Pacific Northwest and little bit of Canada what if the lines from Arizona to California are taken out with a dirty bomb so you cannot fix it really quickly our system forms two self sustaining islands and what it does without our system fre frequency which is like pulse of a human being pulse of a patient keeps going down collapses and leads to blackout major blackout with our system you see a few flickers but quickly isolated quickly reconfigured adaptation is kicked in and it reconfigures the system and restores frequency back in less than 3 and a half seconds similar to the fighter plane identical except in fighter plane was one later on I applied it to Squadron of aircraft then for the Air Force I applied it to the entire Logistics systems for the Department of Defense that was back in the '90s late '90s and early part of this Deca this past decade applied it to layers of infrastructure and that's the result we're getting creating smarts and human brain like to automate exactly the same sensing adaptation and Improvement and learning so what's smart grid you will read many different definitions but there's a unified Vision sensor that are the red dots connected by a communication fabric that enables this rapid restoration to do four things give consumers two-way communication and choice as well as enhance reliability of the system increase the uh overall system efficiency and enable integration of Renewables and electrification of Transportation what are some Pathways forward to do this I give you one nugget that there are several things but I give you one here close to home at University of Minnesota for um Morris that is a sustainable Community we did assessment and as you may know um moris about 150 mil Northwest of Minneapolis on the western edge of the state and it already has two wind turbines integrated these wind turbines not only reduce the amount of electricity bought from outside but reduce the carbon footprint yellow line is the carbon footprint that has gone carbon negative now enabled by this overlay of integration of smarts and new devices into the system so 68% of people surveyed in in our nation had no idea what smart grid is there they see many red lights they see many yellow lights but there are some green lights the red light is cost cost of a the overlay of smart grid is 17 to 24 billion a year for 20 years about 340 to 480 billion total on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure the benefits of that are huge you will save overall you will save about uh $49 billion in outages you will save about 5% improved system efficiency you will also reduce emissions by 12 to 18% according to Electric Power Research Institute and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory it's huge so the cost are very little compared to the benefits we get out of this system allow me to wrap up by a pop quiz how much do you think how many of you tweet how much does your Tweet use not just the not just our device but the whole system the whole system the communication the mobile platforms that we have the wireless system the server farms and so on the whole system uses 025 W hours in 2011 we averaged about 1 billion tweets per week you multiply them is 2 and half large nuclear power plants just to keep our tweeting habit going and this year we are up to 1.7 billion tweets per week so it has increased so as you look ahead there are many opport unities and electricity it improving quality of life Innovations in electricity created a toolmaker dream the Precision the applications we use it for in our Manufacturing in our room right now and in everything we use it's amazing precision and there are many Innovations coming out of it such as smarter systems devices that we have built to power progress to power our nation's economy when you look at what else is possible I want to ask you a question this Suite of Technologies what other benefits what other improvements as you drive home tonight during the reception before you drive home what new new things can be bring by this Suite of Technologies the overlay of devices that enable a more resilient smarter more secure more reliable system thank you [Applause] sure