What is the Grid?
The grid is the electrical connection network consisting of power stations, transmission lines and substations that feed electricity from the generating source to your home or business. 90% of Australia’s electricity comes from coal-fired power stations, which are a significant producer of carbon dioxide (greenhouse gasses) contributing to global warming and climate change. The other 10% comes from renewable sources such as hydro electricity, wind farms and solar.
The idea of the Grid looks forward to a time when the mechanisms for building Grids and Grid applications has standardized sufficiently that everyone is doing it the same way and it is taken for granted that Grid mechanisms are available for just about any kind of computing system or service. We imagine that when Grid mechanisms are ubiquitous, we will refer to the set of all Grid-accessible resources and services as “the Grid,” in the same way that we already refer to the set of all Web-accessible resources as “the Web.” A key difference between today’s Grids and the Grid of the future is that today, Grid application developers typically need to spend considerable time building the Grid on which their application(s) will run, and Grid builders spend considerable time determining whether or not their Grid is interoperable with other Grids and how to make it so if it isn’t already. We’ll be able to say that we’ve arrived at the Grid when these issues are no longer common.
The grid is a large system of interconnected power plants and transmission infrastructure that allows electricity to be moved from one state to another. PNM is a part of the Western grid, which connects 14 states, two Canadian provinces and portions of one Mexican state. The purpose of the grid is to increase reliability for customers by allowing power to be shipped where it might be needed during an emergency or large-scale power failure. Western Electricity Coordinating Council (wecc.
