America’s electrical grid has roots going back to Thomas Edison’s company, Edison Electric Light, which was founded in 1880.   Copying the business model established by Edison, America’s power grid grew organically with states establishing a utility to provide power to residential and business power consumers.  The utilities built and owed the entire infrastructure from the power plants that generated electricity to the transmission lines that carried it to substations and the wires that distributed the power to end users.

Any time the utilities needed more power the solution was clear: Build a new coal-fired plant and connect it to the grid. Over time utilities connected to one another to help provide backup for each other. However, since there was no competition and there was an abundant supply of cheap coal to burn, there was little incentive for the utilties to build an efficient infrastructure.

All this continued until the energy crisis in 1978 when Congress forced the utilities to buy electricity from independent power generation companies that met efficiency goals. Now utilities started buying electricity from sources, sometimes thousands of miles away. The grid was not designed to handle this additional load and a new type of interdependence emerged where an outage in one area could impact millions of people in another state.

Although the utilities needed these vital links between the systems, none of the utilities wanted to spend the money to upgrade them, as their competitors could benefit from their investment.  Because of this dis-incentive to invest in expanding the system’s capabilities, today, the average utility spends just 2% of its revenue to research. Government regulators have been caught in a mire of conflicting federal and state bureaucracies each trying to gain control.

In spite of ever growing demand for electricity and the desire to add wind, solar, nuclear, and more coal-fired plants to the grid, less than 700 miles of interstate transmission lines have gone up since 2000.

When you look at our nation’s telecom and Internet infrastructure, that was built with high capacity long haul “backbone” links designed to interconnect regional phone and Internet exchanges. The idea being that we would like to be able to pick up the phone or email someone on the other side of the country and that requires serious infrastructure to interconnect the regional networks.

We need a similar high capacity and efficient power transportation infrastructure that will support:

1. The ability to add regional green energy (wind, water, solar, etc.) sources to add power that could be used by communities across the country.
2. The ability to reliably transport electricity with minimal loss during transmission.
3. That has a standards based core similar to the Internet’s IP based infrastructure, that will allow for end to end monitoring and intelligence.  We need intelligence from the back bone all the way to communities and homes, like Boulder, Colorado’s Smart Grid City.
4. Develop power storage techniques so we can bank electricity and use it later as needed.

The United States is supposed to have $40 billion in stimulous money for energy and half of that is to go toward grid related projects.  Let’s hope the money is spent wisely and that we can build a new more efficent model for the world to emulate.  

Source:  April 2009 Article from Wired Magazine by Brendan Koerner