To begin with..

2011-05-22T17:11:00.004-04:00

As a home owner, I am (I think) rather a typical consumer of electricity.

By no means am I an industry analyst or what’s called a consumer advocate. By profession, I’m a conference program director / speaker recruiter, and in the course of beginning work with a new client, the world of “Smart Grid” was thrust upon me.

I had to Google a-plenty to prepare for my interview with that new client.

It wasn’t JUST that I had no idea what in tarnation “smart grid” was .. I wasn’t even acquainted with the concept of the ELECTRIC grid.

[And this despite having lived as an adult New Yorker through the August 14, 2003 blackout. I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I tend to simply zone out unfamiliar concepts that don’t immediately interest me or concern me, so the only words I absorbed from those news reports were “power outage.” Terms like “ISO,” “transmission grid,” and “28,700 MW of load” just caused me to turn to Channel Numb.]

No doubt my affinity for comic books and vintage movies had much to do with this, but upon hearing “Smart Grid” my imagination immediately conjured up a super-colossal mesh structure with Frankensteinian sparks snapping across it, securely stationed somewhere like Nebraska.

I was relieved to learn that I was not alone in my ignorance of Smart Grid (with the exception of my husband, a truly voracious reader/scholar/historian; he’s the only person I know who would be .. and in fact was .. absolutely DELIGHTED to receive a biography of Zachary Taylor as a Christmas present. And he’s been reading about Smart Grid since 2008. But I digress.)

A friend of ours – a college professor, and a more conscientious home owner you could not find – was fully familiar with the electric grid concept when I asked him, but not Smart Grid. Other friends I grilled – intelligent, savvy, modern home owners all – had never heard of Smart Grid.

So I started researching .. and found that for the residential electricity consumer, there’s not much yet written about Smart Grid IN ENGLISH, not in techno-babble.

And I thought, well, maybe others might benefit from the research I’m doing to get myself up to speed .. so I decided to share it via this blog and Twitter.

As I understand it, here’s the situation in as small a nutshell as I can squeeze it:

First: of course there’s not a single mondo physical “grid” per se. The “electric grid” is more a figure of speech, much like saying “television NETWORK” to describe how TV content is distributed, and “World Wide WEB” to describe how computer pages of text and images are linked.
The “electric grid” refers to our national electrical delivery system. Also called the U.S. Power Grid, the power distribution grid, the energy grid, etc.
Very, very simply put: the electric grid is a giant, complex network of people and machinery working around the clock to produce and deliver electricity from power plants to millions of homes and offices across the nation.
The problem: this electric grid is OLD. If Thomas Edison were alive today, he’d be quite familiar with our electrical infrastructure - not much has changed in a century. Google's Eric Schmidt noted: “This grid that we depend on is CREAKING.”

OK .. so .. what is SMART Grid, and why should we homeowners care?

Aha! to be continued..

With thanks to these excellent sources:

General Electric - It’s Your Smart Grid - “Empowering smarter energy choices” .. http://www.itsyoursmartgrid.com/pdf/assets/resources/downloads/SmartGrid.pdf
How Stuff Works (A Discovery Company), “How Power Grids Work” .. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/power1.htm
ProCon.org, “What is the electric grid?” .. http://alternativeenergy.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001247
National Electrical Manufacturers Association, “What is Smart Grid and why is it important?” .. http://www.nema.org/gov/energy/smartgrid/whatIsSmartGrid.cfm
Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability, U.S. Department of Energy, “The Interactive Grid” .. http://www.oe.energy.gov/information_center/interactive_grid.htm
Wikipedia, “Electrical Grid” .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_grid

What IS Smart Grid, Anyway?

To begin with..