There are some people in the electric utility industry who just don’t get it. One CEO actually wrote in a leading utility publication, “We already have a smart grid.” The one we built 50 years ago, he says, with its upgrades, is doing just fine, thank you. He doesn’t get it. Yes, today’s transmission and distribution systems allow better monitoring of use, leading to great efficiencies and conservation of electricity.
But that is not enough by a long shot. We have to do more.
Just as President Eisenhower saw the need to build an interstate highway system and superimpose it on the existing hodge-podge of two-lane highways choking our cities and slowing down economic expansion, so President Obama has in mind a network of electric transmission superhighways crisscrossing the continent. And the electricity they carry will be a result of new technologies – some that we know about and some we don’t know very much about – that will, for example, convert AC current to DC at a series of substations across the land before converting the DC back to AC at the point of distribution to final customer.
Wow, that’s new.
No, it’s not.
It’s definitely not a new idea. They’re already doing it in Quebec and China and working on it other developed countries. Another idea is to kick up the voltage to an extra high 765 kilovolts, almost twice as much as is typically carried on those heavy duty high voltage lines now. The advantage, engineers say, is that utilities could minimize the need for converting back and forth between AC and DC.
As they say in the movies, “We have people working on these ideas right now.”
Look, I don’t know if this is where we are going. I’m not an engineer. I just know that we have to do something in order to keep up with demand, in order to provide electricity at cost effective rates, in order to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels (this new superhighway would enable renewable energy – wind and solar – to be carried great distances, from places where it is easily generated to places where it is needed most), and we should all be in favor of that.
It will be a true paradigm shift, yes, in the way we think about electricity, the way it is generated, transmitted and distributed to customers. It will definitely not be business as usual.
To claim that we don’t need to spend the money on a new way of generating, transporting and delivering electricity is naïve at best and irresponsible at worst.
Utilities would do the country – and especially their customers – a service if they would begin to open the window on what the future will make possible, and explain it clearly. For it is through such major innovations that the nation will begin to realize exponential growth in all areas of the economy which, in turn, will lead to the productivity growth we must have to generate the revenues required to service the national debt more easily while continuing to provide the services people have come to expect from their government.
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