What is the Smart Grid and Why Should I Care?

Contributing Editor: Will Johnston

The recent economic stimulus package includes $4.5 billion in funding for 'Smart Grid' infrastructure investment.

The goal of providing a 'Smart Grid' is to provide a much needed upgrade to the national electrical grid used to transfer electricity from the sources (dams, nuclear, coal plants, gas powered generators, etc.) to homes and businesses. The 'smart' part of the upgrade would be to digital, allowing for computer managed logic in the distribution of the electricity.

By providing the 'smart' to the national electric grid the promise of renewable and sustainable technologies for generating electricity is much more realistic. Currently half of electricity generated goes unused, but with a smart grid power generated in a wind farm in North Dakota could be used by a community in Florida.

The smart grid digital infrastructure would include advanced communication, sensors and the ability to intelligently manage and distribute the power created across the national grid. Research on the potential for the smart grid has suggested that the savings in wasted energy and money would be in the billions of dollars and countless tons of C02. It would also allow for home usage of electricity to be optimized for the device utilizing the electricity. The smart grid also will allow for more efficient tapping and re-use of power generated by small sources, like home solar panels or wind turbines.

Creation of a 'Smart Grid' infrastructure would not be easy, cheap or quick. The smart grid would be composed of many technologies and an architecture for the integration of all of the components.

Another benefit of the Smart Grid is that it is expected to provide grid based computing similar to the way we plug into electricity for power. You would be able to tap the computing power you need when you need it by using remote computing power.

This is a much needed upgrade to our infrastructure, which will have huge environmental benefits as well as create cost efficiencies benefiting our nation. Given our economic hard times the creation of an estimated 100,000 + jobs is a huge plus.