Here are some warning signs across the USA:

• In December 2009, a 100 year old water main in San Francisco broke, flooding millions of gallons of water into local businesses and damaging local roadways.
• The nation’s capital experienced 2500 water main breaks in 2008 alone. 
• The Minneapolis I35W bridge crossing the Mississippi River collapsed in 2007, claiming 13 lives.
• 50% of Pennsylvania’s bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete, while other states range from 21% to 56%.
• The average age of a substation transformer is 42 years, for equipment designed to last 40 years.

Our energy and water infrastructure, along with key transportation assets, are aging in place, severely overstressed and in some cases suffering from postponed maintenance as state and city budgets look to save money, and utilities focus on other projects.   The American Society of Civil Engineers produced a report card that gives the USA an overall grade of D for infrastructure.  

It’s an excellent assessment of bridges, energy, transportation, water and wastewater systems, and offers a compelling, state-by-state view of conditions, issues, and projected costs to fix and upgrade systems.    

Their report points out that our electrical transmission and distribution networks are congested as these assets are working to meet demand that is fast approaching capacity limits.  The estimate to update and expand generation, transmission, and distribution goes as high as $2 trillion by 2030.  Yes, it’s a big number, but to have a vibrant economy, we need to invest in a reliable energy infrastructure.  Without these investments, we’ll face a future of more outages for increasing durations of time.  Considering the economic impacts of outages – estimated by the Galvin Electricity Initiative to cost the American economy $150 billion annually – we cannot afford these losses in our current economic situation.

Smart Grid technologies can help us rebuild our infrastructure and achieve the reliability, resiliency, and safety that our society expects and our economy requires.  We can monitor the operating conditions of transmission networks through use of sophisticated sensor networks of synchrophasors, and respond to problems before failures occur.  We can add energy storage facilities across distribution networks to respond to upstream equipment failures and minimize impacts on downstream consumers.  Technology doesn’t have to supply all the answers– we can use policy to enforce tougher energy efficiency standards for office and home devices and thereby decrease electricity needs and alleviate peak demands.  Leveraging technology and regulatory policy, we can integrate more renewable and distributed sources of electricity generation into the grid to improve resiliency and reliability. 

Smart Grid technologies deliver bi-directional communications and energy capabilities to the existing electrical grid.  Many of these same technologies can also add intelligence to the natural gas, water, and transportation infrastructure.  Sensors can detect leaks and create maintenance alerts, resulting in corrective actions before catastrophic events occur.  Bi-directional communications networks give system operators remote management of assets and improved data for analysis and action.  The end results of improving our infrastructure through policy and technology changes – for energy, water, or transportation – will be worth the investment costs when compared to the costs felt in one community in San Bruno tonight. 

Something is missing from these descriptions, and it is time to recognize that the Smart Grid is an energy ecosystem.  Ecosystems are marvelously complex, inter-related environments.  Remove a food source from the food chain, and watch it change.  The same is true with our energy ecosystem – just substitute a form of energy, like coal, for food, and consider the impacts of its absence.  

We have to plan the reduction, if not outright extinction of the dirtiest fossil fuels, and replace them with renewables.  Since many renewables are intermittent energy sources and not steady-state, it means we also need to introduce layered (generation to distribution) energy storage into the grid to accommodate not only ancillary services but complete continuation of electrons even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. 

However, the challenges of introducing new technologies are even more numerous.  For some technologies that make the grid more robust and reliable – like synchrophasors, their deployment won’t cause disruptions – they improve and enhance existing operations.  Most importantly, they are invisible to the average consumer.  But there are other classes of technologies that are much more visible to consumers, like smart meters.

And here is where the challenges really surface for the evolution of the energy ecosystem.  Yes, developing technology is easy.  Deploying technology is hard, especially when it is visible to consumers.  Take the unfortunate example of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).  This utility is the subject of a lawsuit regarding its introduction of smart meters in the Central Valley of California.  Residential consumers in towns like Bakersfield are understandably alarmed at increases in their summer electricity bills, which reflect lots of days with air conditioning to cope with the blast furnace temperatures outside.  I would be too if I were in their shoes – what consumer likes increased bills?  And I should be in their shoes, since my small niche of the PG&E energy ecosystem was altered with a smart meter this past summer.   But I’m not in their shoes.  My bills did not increase.   PG&E did raise electricity rates this summer, but unless you pay close attention to every insert in your bill, these changes in the ecosystem could escape your notice.  However, introduce something new like a smart meter, and an increased electricity bill is the result of that most visible change. 

It’s a planning problem influenced by corporate culture, marketing and communication plans, and consumer awareness.  It is easy for those of us in the Smart Grid and energy sectors to forget that not everyone has the same level of awareness about Smart Grid technologies and benefits.  That’s one reason why I wrote the Smart Grid Dictionary, but this great resource alone won’t be enough to educate consumers about the powerful and compelling reasons to embrace smart meters and other technologies that will be coming to our homes in the next few years.  And face it, most utilities in the USA do not have to compete for consumer mindshare.  That’s one of the tradeoffs of being a regulated business, and the deficits of knowledge resulting from this environment can have expensive ramifications for introductions of visible technologies into the consumer base. 

In hindsight, PG&E should have conducted an advance information campaign to inform, demystify, and reassure consumers about what changes smart meters would bring to their energy ecosystem.  They might have chosen to rollout smart meters first along the cooler coastal areas and go the Central Valley in the wintertime, thereby avoiding a correlation of higher electricity bills as a result to smart meters instead of higher electricity rates.  As a consulting veteran of technology introductions, the best practices include extensive interdisciplinary planning and execution of the plan.  Properly managed evolutions in the energy ecosystem keep the call volumes down in the contact centers, avoid legal entanglements and bad publicity, and maintain harmony with the regulatory agencies.