BY DR. STEVEN SHEPARD

I’ve just read a fascinating article about one of the Obama administration’s top issues: the Smart Grid. The article profiles the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Florida, which will serve the city of Arcadia.

President Obama has observed:

[T]o realize the full potential of this plant and others like it, we’ve got to do more than just add extra solar megawatts to our electrical grid. That’s because this grid — which is made up of everything from power lines to generators to the meters in your home — still runs on century-old technology. It wastes too much energy, it costs us too much money, and it’s too susceptible to outages and blackouts.

He’s right. Service delivery is only as good as the network it’s delivered over, whether we’re talking about media content, broadband access, power, or physical goods delivered over the road. New electricity infrastructure is only as good as the underlying power grids, and at the moment it ain’t all that good.

As an example: T. Boone Pickens recently decided against the construction of a massive Texas wind farm, because the grid just couldn’t handle delivery of the power that the plant would generate.

Improving the Smart Grid is crucial because we’re currently wasting billions of kilowatt-hours at night when there’s low demand. There’s no way to effectively store the power that’s generated; if we don’t consume it, it just goes away. A Smart Grid model seeks to improve efficiency and balance demand. For example, under a Smart Grid model, customers would receive incentives for charging electric vehicles only during the late evening. This is great.

The Obama administration has earmarked a lot of money for Smart Grid projects:

• $1 billion for creating incentives for consumers to use off-peak electricity by giving them access to smart meters and dynamic pricing schemes;
• $400 million for improving electricity distribution, transmission, and stability with digital monitoring and power grid automation;
• $2 billion for the use of smart meters, appliances, and thermostats, and to develop and improve communication between the grid and plug-in hybrid cars and battery-electric vehicles;
• $25 million for enlarging the manufacturing base for smart meters, transformers and appliances.

The $3.4 billion includes funding for a million in-home smart meters, 170,000 smart thermostats and 175,000 other “load control devices.” This sounds terrific, but raises a question: will human nature adapt to the new model?

Can we expect people to change their consumption habits to take best advantage of this new technology?