The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

The first critical difference is that with a perfect, future smart grid, electricity might be made everywhere. Flows of power would be multidirectional as rooftop solar met backyard wind met big nuclear or hydro, and the output of all these types of generators would intermingle “intelligently” on the wires. Second, information would also travel freely between utility, customers, and the various machines that populate the grid, including both those that used electricity and those that produced it. The movement of both information and electricity would be monitored because meters could run both forward and backward, keeping perfect track of electricity outputs and inputs from even the smallest sources. Smart thermostats would form the hub of home-based networks of smart appliances that altered their behaviors without direct human intervention to take into account real-time, variable pricing of electricity. Since the lines necessary to carry radically distributed, uncoordinated, and small-scale generation to market also needed to be smart (which is to say to have some basic digital computing capacities), it made sense to build the two functionalities into the same set of wires. Information and electricity finally, in Boulder, becoming one.