The Smart Approach to a Smart Grid

Don't feel bad if your eyes glazed over this story reporting the Obama administration is going to put $3.4 billion behind an upgraded electrical grid – the so-called "smart grid." But it may match the Senate climate change hearings as the most important energy story of the day – and it's no less important when it comes to getting the public on board.

As a discussion topic, the electrical grid combines the excitement of municipal water and sewer systems with the seductive allure of the tax code. Yet our current grid is aging, increasingly overloaded, and not up to the challenges we're going to face.

Here are a few of the things the country won't be able to do unless we upgrade the grid:

• 
  Expand wind and solar power. The best places for wind farms, for example, are on the Great Plains, but not that many of us live on the prairie. We need better long-distance lines to carry the power to where it’s needed. Plus, the grid needs to be able to deal with the peaks and valleys in power generation that occur naturally when the wind dies off or the sun goes down.


• Move to electric cars. If people are going to start driving cars like the Chevy Volt or the Nissan Leaf, that means less use of oil but more demand on our electricity grid. That means an increase in demand, and maybe making electric charging stations as common as gas stations are now.


• Just keep up with demand. Even if relatively little changes about how we get our energy, the country is going to demand more and more of it over the next 20 years. Right now the power grid is already running close to capacity in certain parts of the country, like Southern California and the New York-Washington corridor. A better grid will help avoid summer blackouts and other potential problems.

The "smart grid" would combine the communications power of the Internet with the brute force capacity of the current network. For example, right now the utility knows how much power you’re using, but not necessarily why you’re using it. A smart grid would allow the utility to know much more precisely what was causing a surge in demand, and shift resources to meet it. And technology at your business or home would know the grid was approaching capacity and be able to make its own adjustments, cutting back on the electricity you could afford to give up (say, adjusting your thermostat) while keeping the essential stuff.

Plus, upgrading the grid is about as bipartisan as energy policy gets, with backing ranging from environmental groups to business leaders. So why should the public care? Can't we leave this to the professionals, the power companies and the engineers?

The problem is that upgrading the grid is going to touch a lot of people very closely. Local groups frequently resist new power lines or power plants in their neighborhood. People aren't used to the idea of the power company playing Big Brother with their energy use.

The smart grid is like just about every other aspect of energy policy: it touches people too closely to take public opinion for granted. Policies that seem like no-brainers to the experts can still run afoul of the public if they're not handled right. That's completely avoidable. But it means someone has to take the time to explain the options to people and help them weigh the choices. We've made a start on doing that.

Because if you want people to plug in the smart grid, you've got to take the time to get them to buy in first.