TW: Everything I read about alternative energy ends up circling back to the power grid to actually deliver that alternative energy. When we discuss stimulus spending, power grid upgrades are probably some of the most relevant and needed components of national spending. Especially as it is the sort of investment with chicken and the egg and regulatory aspects which need governmental prodding in order to accelerate. Not to mention vested interests probably trying to keep the infrastructure status quo in order to slow down alternatives.
From Newsweek:
"A clean-energy economy will require lots of new hardware—sleeker wind turbines, more efficient solar panels, recharging stations for electric vehicles. It'll also require smarter software, to efficiently guide energy to where it's most needed. Always ambitious, Google hopes to be the architect of this software.
...The electric grid is in many ways the backbone of our economy. Beginning in Thomas Edison's time, we've built a massive system to both generate and move electricity around the country, from nuclear-power plants and coal-fired generating facilities, across a huge infrastructure of wires and into people's homes. However ... in many ways [the grid] isn't up to the task that we're asking it to take on in the next couple of decades … If we're really going to take advantage of renewable energy, we have to build substantially more transmission capacity to move wind-generated electricity from the Dakotas to Chicago or solar-generated power from the Southwest to L.A.
...We've also got to build a more intelligent grid. Electricity generally flows in one direction, from where it's generated to where it's used, but increasingly we want to be able to send electricity in multiple directions. For example, if we have a fleet of millions of plug-in vehicles, we've got to have a grid that not only knows how to fill up the batteries with electricity, but one where the same vehicles can send electricity back to the grid when it needs it. They can serve as a large storage capacity for the grid.
...we need what are called smart meters. These are meters that record real-time information and can send it over the Internet to utilities, and then get it directly to consumers. You wouldn't expect to go into a grocery store and do your shopping and not know what the prices for anything were and only get a bill at the end of the month. We need to get to a point where people have a lot more sense about what we're paying for energy at any given point, and more choice about where it comes from and how green it is."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/169165
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