Right now, America’s energy, economic, and environmental futures are at a crossroads. It’s clear that President Barack Obama understands the urgent need to modernize the nation’s obsolete power grid. He sees the connection between infrastructure investment and the opportunity to create new, tech-savvy jobs that can stimulate the economy. By including funding for grid modernization in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, his administration is prioritizing an initiative that is critical to the nation’s globally competitive business success, yet one that has been largely overlooked at the federal level for decades.
Unfortunately, the consumer, societal, and business benefits are less clear, because the vast majority of grid-related stimulus funding appears destined to primarily expand, not cure, the ailing system we have today.
Moving Beyond Centralized Power Systems
Investing mostly in high-voltage transmission projects, for example, moves us away from economic recovery and toward a more centralized power system, while stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. Building a national backbone grid without creating incentives for utilities and technology companies to update local power systems will lead to massive gridlock. Smart energy will be dumped into dumb systems, reducing efficiency and wasting taxpayer dollars.
This kind of conventional wisdom got us where we are today — to a position where we are hobbled by an antiquated power system and policies that block improvements and undermine energy security and sustainability. There is indeed no industry or infrastructure that is more a prisoner of the past or more afraid of the future than the U.S. electricity supply sector.
Instead of focusing on new transmission lines that are politically expedient from a federal perspective, real economic opportunities in grid modernization can be most quickly and cost-effectively achieved through the installation of innovative smart grid technology that fundamentally improves local electricity distribution and service. Moving forward, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) should focus on the ways that smart technology can most quickly and sustainably create jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve efficiency, and reduce carbon emissions. Smart grid stimulus projects should only be funded if they can demonstrably meet these objectives and the project sponsors, both public and private, are accordingly held accountable. What the DOE will discover is that the most powerful stimulus application of smart grid technology can be made at the community electricity distribution level.
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