How Dumb is the Smart Grid?

There's been much talk of the smart grid, but compared with the Internet, the electricity network is pretty dumb.

It's a point lamented by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in remarks he made last week at a Natural Resources Defense Council event in New York. Schmidt said:

Now, I’m a computer scientists; I think about the Internet. I look at the electric grid and I say, why is the electric grid the same as it was in the 1960s? Because nobody cared. Nobody tried to build the grid that was flexible, scalable, decentralized, and had decentralized control to get on and off.

Here’s an example, you guys have all of the batteries sitting in your cars? What are they doing in your garage? Why can they not add to peak load, when peak load is needed? The utilities say that the highest cost of being a utility is not average load, but peak load, which is in the afternoons. Right, plug your car in, draw the battery down, charge it up at night, straight forward. Seems obvious right? You can’t do it because the computerization of the Internet, and so forth. seems obvious, right? The grid is not organized that way.

(Video of Eric Schmidt at the Natural Resources Defense
Council event , 33 minutes.)

Tom Friedman, in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, envisions a smart grid—or energy Internet, as he calls it—drawing electricity from car batteries while parked during peak periods, leaving enough power to get the driver home at night. To do that will require a lot of smart computing power. And, that means a lot of IT savvy professionals will be needed to make the electric grid as smart as the Internet. That should only help keep IT employment levels well above the rest of the workforce.

But most of the new green jobs won't be held by IT professionals. In its recently published Green Energy 2030 proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, Google estimates its plan could create 9 million net new jobs in the electrical efficiency and renewable energy sectors alone by 2030.


Source: Google
(Click on graphic to enlarge)

Job Estimates


Source: Google
(Click on graphic to enlarge)