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Utilities have been experimenting with small smart-grid initiatives on their own - for example, wiring 50,000 homes in Boulder, Colo., and installing 100,000 smart meters in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. But creating a truly nationwide smart grid - a goal for the Obama White House - won't be cheap and it won't be easy. That's why the news on April 20 that the city of Miami was launching a $200 million smart-grid initiative that would connect virtually every home and business in Miami-Dade County by 2011 was so important. Led by the greenish utility giant Florida...
...smart meters will be the cornerstone of the program, which is called Energy Smart Miami. While conventional meters do little more than count up the kilowatts sent to a building - they're one-way devices, which means that if a home loses power, the utility doesn't know about it until they receive a phone call - smart meters will communicate two ways, like a computer, allowing utilities to keep precise tabs on their power flow and customers to go online and monitor exactly how much electricity they're using at any given time, by the month, day or hour. Better...
Silver Spring is by far the smallest player in the Energy Smart Miami initiative, but its contributions are key. The Silicon Valley startup will supply the software that will make the smart grid smart, using the open technology platform Internet Protocol to send data through the system. Although using an open platform has made some experts concerned about the security of a smart grid, Lang points out that his company's software will make it easier to adapt the grid to new technologies - smart appliances, plug-in cars - that might arise down the road. "This is going...
About 1,000 homes will be enrolled in an advanced trial that will turn them into smart buildings, with smart control panels and thermostats that will help manage electrical loads and reduce energy use during peak periods. (One of the biggest potential benefits of the smart grid is the ability to manage the electrical load; today utilities need to have enough capacity to meet rare days of peak demand, but if a smart grid could smooth out those peaks, it might reduce the need for new power plants.) "We invested a lot in this technology," says Lewis...
...ground without a lot of help from Washington. Half the $200 million price tag of the first phase of the project will come from federal stimulus spending, and there's more to come. Along with the $3.3 billion in grant money set aside by the Department of Energy for smart-grid tech, another $615 million is set to be spent on projects for energy storage and monitoring. To Washington, building the smart grid is about more than energy - it's about creating jobs, an investment that will stimulate the economy today and pay off later. "This [industry] is going...