Carbon Emissions are Electrification’s Fault

Electrical power has been around since the late 1800s and there are many experts both academic and industry who have spent their entire lives working with it. The one thing that is universal, globally, is the measurement methods. Since the entire world measures the same way, innovation and advancement are relegated to that constraint with the assumption that these measurement methods provide all the information possible.

Take a moment to consider the evolution of electricity. Nikola Tesla did not have the advantage of computers at the time and was tasked with finding a way to meter it. With the absence of computing power, the only possible option for metering electricity at that time was to use an indirect method of measurement. Thus, an industry was born using Root Mean Squared, which is nothing more than acquiring data points over a period of time and using averages and integrals to determine values. It is imprecise.

Humans never transitioned from an indirect method of electricity measurement to a direct method. We have gotten much faster with the indirect samples and have improved the “accuracy,” but indirect methods of electricity measurement can never be truly accurate.

Today, in all the research laboratories and academic institutions as well as all of the advanced power analyzers and power electronics, all measurement methods are indirect, with absolutely zero continuous precision measurements at the subcycle level in Real-Time as it flows.

Because there has never been any direct measurement of electricity, that means the entire grid, including all generation, transmission, distribution, storage and loads have been built without ever being able to definitively examine electricity’s behavior. This has culminated into our modern grid and economy where the entire world unquestionably embraces the pros and cons of this approach as fact, never revisiting the fundamental premise, just constantly working to maintain and advance the existing system.

To be clear, it is a given that humans have advanced indirect electricity measurement. In fact, the sample rates have gotten so fast that it can easily be assumed any gains in visibility from faster measurement would be nominal at best. But this is the modern day equivalent of “the world is flat” because it is all being measured indirectly.

Would it be more or less accurate to measure the volume of water passing a single spot on a river without directly measuring it?

3DFS has discovered and harnessed the ability to directly measure electricity. Direct measurement of electricity radically changes what is known and what is possible in the world of energy.

The bare knuckle truth behind excessive global carbon emissions is and always has been electrification’s fault. We beneficiaries have simply continued what our electrical forefathers were doing and now find ourselves in the unenviable position of reversing course in the face of almost certain devastation.

I encourage everybody to look from this point of view because it is critical to global energy sustainability and imperative in the quest for global greenhouse gas emission reduction.

Where the losses are counted

The national ledger is still kept. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory charts the energy of the nation each year, from the fuel to the work it does. Most of what the charts count as rejected energy comes from an estimate of end-use efficiency. The About page follows that ledger from the plant to the wires and into the facility.

The national charts derive the electricity stream from retail sales and generation input. Inside the facility, poor power quality turns more of the delivered electricity into heat. These losses sit after the meter, in the panels and the machines. That is where our controllers connect.

How the industry got here

The SDE Summary page puts the history in one line: each power quality problem was solved once, correctly, for a load that no longer exists. Capacitor banks answered the lagging motor load of the mid-twentieth century. Then solid-state drives arrived, and the load stopped being linear. Each fix since is an analog device applied at a point, sized against a load study and fixed at installation. The buildings underneath now add and remove electronic load continuously.

Measurement has a history of its own. Root mean square (RMS) reduces a changing waveform to one effective value over a measurement window. That value is useful for ratings and monitoring, as the Technology page notes, but a summary cannot show each change as it happens.

Where this stands today

The About page records a related gap that grid engineers now describe. A North American SynchroPhasor Initiative report found that filtering inside phasor measurement units can miss or misrepresent the high-frequency oscillations of AI workloads.

The Data Centers and Compute page notes that Class A power quality meters detect dips at half-cycle resolution. Each of our pilots starts with a measured baseline and ends with an instrumented result.

Related reading

• SDE Summary: measure, model and correct at the panel, each cycle
• Electric Optimization: current that heats conductors and fills transformers without doing work