Smart Grid

On Thursday, while visiting Jefferson City, Mo., with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Vice President Joe Biden announced that, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more than $3.3 billion in smart grid technology development grants and an additional $615 million for smart grid storage, monitoring, and technology viability were being made available.

Experts assert that the U.S. grid—already proven by federal agencies to be vulnerable to cyber attacks—has been compromised by spies who tried to map the system and left bugs that could be used to disrupt networks at a time of war or crisis.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has contracted the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to help it develop an interim road map to harmonize interoperability standards for the smart grid.

Al Gore, in his recent New York Times op-ed titled "The Climate for Change," calls for a "$400 billion investment over ten years to construct a national smart grid to distribute renewable energy." Echelon supports these proposed investments. We also believe the answer is not just in constructing something new but in transforming the existing […]

What do you do when your research institution is losing roughly half a million dollars annually as a result of multiple electricity outages — and electricity demand keeps rising? If you’re the Illinois Institute of Technology, you turn the challenge into a campuswide learning experience by teaming with the Galvin Electricity Initiative and other experts to design and construct a prototype Perfect Power System (PPS). Even during its implementation, the PPS promises to provide more reliable and sustainable electricity to the university at a lower cost than it had been paying.

House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled a 648-page discussion draft of the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” a bill touted as a “comprehensive approach to America’s energy policy” because it seeks to establish, among other things, a carbon emissions reduction goal, a cap-and-trade program, and a federal renewable energy standard.

Building new transmission lines indicates support for the development of a national grid, but doing so would ultimately stifle entrepreneurship and innovation, a campaign focused on the creation of a “perfect” consumer-focused electric energy system has warned.

Beacon Power Corp., whose much-watched flywheel system is designed regulate grids using efficient energy storage, is teaming with American Electric Power (AEP) and Columbus Southern Power Co. to build a 1-MW regulation facility in the coming months at an AEP site in Groveport, Ohio.

ITC Holdings Corp. last week said that over the past year it has worked to develop the “Green Power Express,” a network of transmission lines that would move12,000 MW of power from wind-abundant areas in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa to Midwest load centers, such as Chicago, southeastern Wisconsin, Minneapolis, and other states that demand renewable energy.

The $825 billion economic stimulus bill rolled out last week by House Democrats includes $19.96 billion of tax incentives for wind and solar energy, $53.75 billion for direct spending on energy technology programs largely focused on energy efficiency and on the national grid, and $18.27 billion for water and environmental spending.