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WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is giving a jolt to the futuristic "smart" electric grid, hoping to more quickly bring America's power transmission system into the digital age. President Barack Obama, during a visit to a solar energy facility in Arcadia, Fla., is announcing Tuesday that he is making available $3.4 billion in government support for 100 projects aimed at modernizing the power grid. The projects include installing "smart" electric meters in homes, automating utility substations, and installing thousands of new digital transformers and grid sensors.

President Barack Obama will announce a $3.4 billion investment of stimulus funds to modernize the electric grid at an event in Arcadia, Fla., Tuesday, administration officials said. One-hundred private companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and others will receive grants of between $400,000 and $200 million to help build a nationwide "smart energy grid" that will cut costs for consumers and make the nation's electrical system more reliable. The grants are expected to create tens of thousands of jobs - the administration did not say exactly how many - and also lay down the infrastructure to create a new renewable energy industry,...

A 90-page document released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released on September 24 proposes 77 standards for smart grid development. The report also detailed 14 areas that the government agency will prioritize in order to facilitate development. Utilities, regulators, and vendors have been waiting for this release from the NIST. The report details specific standards that utilities and developers will be expected to meet in their smart grid deployment. The institute will continue working on cybersecurity standards which should be released by the end of the year. The NIST began working on a set of standards...

Electromagnetic pulse is hardly a household term. But perhaps it should be. Every computer we buy, every system we turn over to computer control, every device that relies on electronic components — all cars, TVs and phones, for instance — makes us more vulnerable to such a high-energy rain of electrons. EMP is a powerful and potentially devastating form of electromagnetic "fallout." It’s usually associated with nuclear weapons, although it can be triggered by any major explosive bursts. Unlike radioactive fallout, this rain won’t directly harm living things. It will just catastrophically fry all electronics and modern electrical systems by...

Cisco Systems' gear powers much of the Internet, but the company last month made a move to also play a central role in a market it says might be 100 times bigger -- smart grids. Cisco's not alone. The building of smart grids will be a multitrillion-dollar opportunity for tech companies, industry observers say. The first billions are already starting, thanks in part to the federal stimulus package. Smart grids combine networked sensors with software to run systems for electricity, transportation, fuel and water. Inexpensive sensors transmit data over computer networks to do such tasks as reduce energy usage and...

Thomas Alva Edison, meet the Internet. More than a century after Edison invented a reliable light bulb, the nation's electricity-distribution system, an aging spider web of power lines, is poised to move into the digital age. The "smart grid" has become the buzz of the electric-power industry, at the White House and among members of Congress. President Obama says it's essential to boost development of wind and solar power, get people to use less energy and tackle climate change. What smart-grid visionaries see coming are home thermostats and individual appliances that adjust automatically based on the cost of power, and...

What smart grid visionaries see coming are home thermostats and appliances that adjust automatically depending on the cost of power; where a water heater may get juice from a neighbor's rooftop solar panel; and 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

Consumers to benefit from savings achieved through increased awareness of energy use but householders likely to pick up some of the costs of the compulsory, nationwide scheme Every home in the UK must be fitted with a "smart meter" by 2020 to reduce energy use and pave the way for a low-carbon "smart grid", under plans unveiled by the government today. The new meters will send information on real-time electricity and gas use in households and small businesses direct to utility companies, eliminating the need for customers to stay at home for meter readings or to receive over-estimated bills. However,...

As promised, General Electric wants to give the scarecrow some brains by building a smarter electric grid. The first stop is Miami, where GE, Florida Power & Light, Cisco Systems, and Silver Spring Networks will roll out a $200 million overhaul of the electric grid for 1 million Miami homes and businesses over the next two years. SNIP What will Miami’s smart grid do, exactly? The whole power grid, from power plants to wall sockets, will be put on an Internet footing. That will let the power company—FPL—get a better handle on how electricity flows through its system and better...

Given the potential inconvenience and 'Big Brother' aspect of utilities controlling home appliances, it's time to convince energy users. "The smart grid means many things to many people," said Mark Farber, co-founder of Evergreen Solar and now a consultant with Photon Consulting, at the Ceres Conference in San Francisco last week. Given that Uncle Sam plans to spend $4.5 billion developing and constructing one, it's time to start bridging some of the gaps between what it means to utilities, technology companies, and grid wonks—and what it means to plain old energy users. Making the smart grid's most basic elements—two-way communication...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The Obama Administration Thursday unveiled a new solicitation for around $4 billion in stimulus funding for new power-transmission technology. The Administration wants to spur development of a new artificially intelligent "smart" grid that could drastically increase the efficiency of the nation's electricity infrastructure. The Department of Energy announced plans to distribute $3.4 billion in smart-grid technology grants and $615 million for smart-grid demonstration projects. "We need an upgraded electrical grid to take full advantage of the vast renewable resources in this country - to take the wind from the Midwest and the sun from the Southwest and power...

Foreign hackers have reportedly managed to break into the computer network controlling the nation's power grid. The discovery has raised alarm about how such unauthorized access could be used to harm the U.S., though the discovery may motivate actions to strengthen the security systems surrounding the nation's infrastructure. A Wall Street Journal report that foreign hackers have repeatedly penetrated the U.S. power grid computer network has delivered a loud wake-up call. Cyber-spies from countries including China and Russia have breached the electrical infrastructure's computer network and left software tools behind that would have allowed them to control or destroy infrastructure...

How Green Was My Forecast by: Heather Latham, April 08, 2009 What does John Podesta, CEO and President of the Center for American Progress (CAP) , think will best stimulate the economy? “[T]he transformation of our outdated energy infrastructure to new platforms of efficiency and reduce carbon emissions represents the great potential engine for economic recovery, for job growth, for innovation, and for long-term sustainable growth for our economy.” He argued at the CAP event on April 1st that “President Obama and our congressional leaders recognized this nexus when they included in the stimulus package an unprecedented $90 billion of...

Infrastructure: The stimulus plan to turn America's electrical infrastructure into a so-called "smart grid" is a potential target for unfriendly hackers. It's also the fulfillment of a campaign promise rooted in socialism.There is $4.5 billion in the stimulus package to modernize the nation's electricity system. The whole idea is to monitor where and when electricity is used and to direct it to where and when it is needed. It is thought this will help utilities to adjust their rates to immediate supply and demand for power. It would supposedly allow consumers to adjust their consumption to the times when they...

General Electric (GE) thinks 100 kilobits per second might be fine for reading electric meters. But 1 to 2 megabits per second is what's needed to make the split-second automation of the electricity distribution grid a reality. That's what GE expects its new WiMax-based wireless communication system will be able to achieve for utility CenterPoint Energy (CNP) In a contract announced Monday, GE will install a network of its WiMax-based MDS Mercury 3650 radios to link the utility's "backhaul" communications systems to collection points. Those collection points will aggregate data from millions of so-called "smart meters" that CenterPoint is installing...

Deployments of smart grids should be slowed until security vulnerabilities are addressed, according to some cybersecurity experts, citing tests showing that a hacker can cause a major blackout after breaking into a smart-grid system. The idea behind smart grids, a burgeoning energy sector in which even Google is playing a role, is that automated meters and two-way power consumption data can be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of an electrical system's power distribution. A washing machine in a household hooked up to a smart meter, for instance, could be set up to run only at lower-cost, off-peak hours,...

TXU and CURRENT Communications to Create Nation's First Multipurpose Smart Grid Texas-based utility TXU Electric Delivery, the nation’s sixth large electric transmission and distribution company and a subsidiary of TXU Corp., and CURRENT Communications Group, LLC have announced an agreement to transform TXU’s power distribution network into the nation’s first broadband-enabled ‘smart’ electric grid. Key elements of the announcement include the following: CURRENT will construct a Broadband over Power Line (BPL) network to serve more than two million TXU Electric Delivery customers in the Greater Dallas-Fort Worth area and in other Texas communities. Overlaid on the existing electric distribution...