Smart Grid is Generating Buzz

The "smart grid" has become the buzz of the electric power industry, at the White House and among members of Congress. President Barack Obama says it's essential to boost development of wind and solar power, get people to use less energy and to tackle climate change.

Smart grids will allow for home thermostats and appliances that adjust automatically depending on the cost of power, a water heater may get juice from a neighbor's rooftop solar panel and on a hot day a plug-in hybrid electric car charges one minute and the next sends electricity back to the grid to help head off a brownout

Utilities will get instant feedback on a transformer outage, shift easily among energy sources, integrating wind and solar energy with electricity from coal-burning power plants, and go into homes and businesses to automatically adjust power use based on prearranged agreements.

"It's the marriage of information technology and automation technology with the existing electricity network. This is the energy Internet," said Bob Gilligan, vice president for transmission at GE Energy, which is aggressively pursuing smart grid development. "There are going to be applications 10 years from now that you and I have no idea that we're going to want or need or think are essential to our lives."

The grid is already being tested around the country.

On the University of Colorado campus in Boulder, the chancellor's home has been turned into a smart grid show-house as part of a citywide $100 million demonstration project spearheaded by Xcel Energy. The home has a laptop-controlled electricity management system that integrates a rooftop solar panel with grid-supplied power and tracks energy use as well as equipment to charge a plug-in hybrid electric car.

Florida Power & Light is planning to provide “smart meters” covering 1 million homes and businesses in the Miami area over the next two years in a $200 million project. Smart meters are being distributed by utilities from California to Delaware's Delmarva Peninsula.

Center Point Energy, which serves 2.2 million customers in the metropolitan Houston area, expects to spend $1 billion over the next five years on smart grid. Residential customers are seeing an additional $3.24 a month on their electric bills, but Center Point says that should be more than offset by energy savings.

An Energy Department study projects energy savings of 5 percent to 15 percent from smart grid. The cost and payback have some state regulators worried.

"We need to demonstrate to folks that there's a benefit here before we ask them to pay for this stuff," says Frederick Butler, chairman of New Jersey's utility commission and president of NARUC, the national group that represents these state agencies.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, said the current grid stands in the way of increasing the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar that "will need a system that can dispatch power here, there and everywhere on a very quick basis."

Right now the cost is going to heavily outweigh the benefits of the smart grid with an estimated 75 billion dollar price tag. Yes, energy being reused from multiple sources rather than just one is better for the environment, but the added cost to build such an infrastructure and upgrade people’s homes might be too high right now with the benefits not coming until much later. Small steps and changes will surely be the best way to implement these new technologies and help offset the cost.

This will be one of our greatest assets in the future as we implement more and more diverse sources of energy and energy production. Just as farmers are producing electricity for their farms and community through methane production from the waste of their animals and are sending the excess energy back to the local grid, one day every individual home owner may be able to contribute to the grid with the excess energy produced via solar panels on their homes.

A power system that has the people contributing to it will bring down costs and reliance on a single source for power. Large scale power outages will be reduced, and as more and more renewable energy is contributed to the grid, the need for fossil fuel-based energy will decline, and in turn will reduce our carbon footprint and our impact on the environment. The sun and wind are our friends!

Check out this interactive map of a smart grid for a better understanding of the system!