“Is the average consumer willing to pay the upfront costs of a new smart grid and then respond appropriately to price signals?
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said at a recent hearing on smart grid.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu worry about security. “If you want to create mischief one very good way to create a great deal of mischief is to actually bring down a smart grid system. This system has to be incredibly secure,” Chu said.
On the other hand, Chu says that the current grid stands in the way of increasing the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar that “will need a system that can dispatch power here, there and everywhere on a very quick basis.”
According to an article at Associate Press today, the “smart grid” has become the buzz of the electric power industry, at the White House and among members of Congress. President Barack Obama says it’s essential to boost development of wind and solar power, get people to use less energy and to tackle climate change. What smart grid visionaries see coming are home thermostats and appliances that adjust automatically depending on the cost of power; a world where a water heater may get juice from a neighbor’s rooftop solar panel, where on a scorching hot day a plug-in hybrid electric car charges one minute and the next sends electricity back to the grid to help head off a brownout. It is a world where utilities get instant feedback on a transformer outage, shift easily among energy sources, integrating wind and solar energy with electricity from coal-burning power plants, and go into homes and businesses to automatically adjust power use based on prearranged agreements.
