Ideally, the electranet would be designed to have features similar to the internet: It should be scalable and extensible, so that intelligence can be added to new sources and loads as the technology matures.

One of the exciting longer-term options available with a smart grid is vehicle-to-grid interaction for load balancing and smoothing transients: Electric and plug-in hybrids could communicate with the grid and provide a distributed battery system to handle surge capacity requirements on a local level.

The potential benefits of a smart grid are hard to estimate, but there are many positive synergies that could be tapped.  I suspect that the benefits are generally underestimated, for that reason.

Can this be set up so that the entire grid over a quarter of North America does not go down if a single relay or something is damaged?

If there is a national security benefit, it might motivate the hawks to get on board. And anyone critical of the project could be branded as anti-American.

It's just such a huge political challenge, because all the utilities will have to figure out how to interoperate much more closely than they do today.  And they will have to accept a major change in their role: no longer are they the primary source of power; they're just the "shipping company".

And, as I said, it's a big technical challenge as well, more so than the linked article really lets on.  All the pieces of the technology are there, sure.  But putting them together so that they all play nice with each other, and provide 99.9999% uptime, is much harder.  The current grid is dumber than a bag of hammers, but it's simple (relatively speaking; it's not simple in any absolute sense).

http://www.terrawatts.com/stanford-news.html and

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/features/feature_templ ...

You can see it in the home of Jim Chuda, a green architect whose ecologically safe Hollywood Hills home features recycled aluminum bathroom tiles, energy-efficient ceiling fans and insulation made from old blue jeans.

That just sounds like good old-fashioned energy conservation, programs for these types of activities have been around since the 1980's.

A battery backup that looks like a chrome refrigerator sits in Chuda's garage and automatically maximizes the use of his solar panels by ensuring the electricity generated by them is used first, before any is taken from the grid...among a slew of intelligent energy management innovations that have the power to let any home or business become a net provider of electricity back to the grid.
 

That's covered under current net metering standards.

the Galvin Electricity Initiative, a campaign to create a new power system, noted that today's electricity grid is antiquated.

With strung wires, transformers hanging at meters and overbuilt infrastructure designed to accommodate peak usages, electricity is - as activists have long pointed out - the last industry to digitize.

Except nothing that's being proposed is actually going to change any of that...

Designing a system that allows your dishwasher or refrigerator to sense changes in the power grid and automatically reduce a home's electricity consumption, or let homeowners see how many kilowatts of electricity they are using at any given minute, is close to a reality.

Two way communications is a change, and can help reduce the need to 'overbuild' (as is every other infrastructure system that has varying usage, highways, fire exits, interior house wiring, water systems, etc., etc.) to meet peaks by allowing the utility the ability to control those peaks.  

However, the technology to fully deploy this is still in development, I.E. manufacturers were working on developing standards for 'smart appliances' that can respond to utility signals last summer, that hardly makes the existing system 'antiquated'.  

We have spent the last year working on a pilot program to develop an active load control program.  Although many customers were excited to participate and like the program...or at least the intent behind the program, many others see this as a 'Big Brother' intrusion into their private lives.

Utilities have been running load control programs for years with water heaters using pager type signals or power line carrier signals, the fact that newer technology is being developed (or that more customers are now willing to allow their devices to be controlled) overlooks the efforts that were conducted before it became 'fashionable'.

Just an old farts rant against the 'resistance from entrenched utility interests' stereotype that is being trotted out, I guess...


Common sense is an oxymoron...