Quick note to flag an excellent Podcast discussion summing up all that’s happening with Smart Grid in the USA right now. In it, NPR Science Friday’s Ira Flatow interviews:
- Kurt Yeager, head of California’s Galvin Electricity Initiative and former campaign advisor on energy to John McCain
- Dean Kammen, Distinguished Professor of energy at UC Berkeley, where he founded the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. (Also a former senior advisor to the Obama campaign.)

Though it’s a US-centric discussion, I heard a number of things that struck me as globally important. The US mobilizing a huge amount of money on this topic, sure, but the knock-on effect of that is that some of the business world’s most biggest technology and innovation companies are suddenly, shall we say, very motivated. Also, upcoming experiments with policy in the US (implementation, creating incentives) may well provide learnings worth observing.

Key take-aways for me:

(1) The Obama Administration’s recently passed stimulus package contains roughly $11B earmarked for smart grid improvements to the national infrastructure, but Prof. Kammen described this as just a “down payment” on a transformation that will eventually cost an estimated $200 and $400B (or more!) to fully realize.

(2) The term “smart grid” really means different things to different people - people agree on what it would enable, e.g. greater energy efficiency, distributed generation via renewables, more secure & stable supplies etc. (see previous posts on this). However, the technical means to be used are debatable … and not all have been invented yet. There is a scramble by IT giants like IBM, Google, Cisco and Microsoft to enter this suddenly ballooning market, but existing silicon and software readapted for this new purpose will only get us part of the way there, according to Prof. Kammen.

(3) Although the federal (national) government is leading the charge in the US, smart grid implementation needs to begin at the local level first, Mr. Yeager says. Practically speaking, smart grid won’t provide much practical benefit otherwise.

(4) State regulatory regimes today actually disincentivize power companies to adopt smart grid, because they reward them economically for maximizing production — not efficiency. Prof. Kammen called, for example, for pricing regulations where power companies make their production forecasts in advance, obtaining higher prices per kWh if they undershoot the forecast, and lower prices if they overshoot. Interesting.

The last two issues call for central governments to strong-arm potentially slower moving state/provincial ones, something that might not be a challenge for Beijing, perhaps, but could be a big headache for New Delhi.

(US Department of Energy map courtesy of Science Friday)