U.S. President Obama Calls for a More Reliable and Resilient Grid — But How Will His Nation Respond?

Writing for Smart Grid News, Jesse Berst explains that the Obama administration’s call for a multi-billion-dollar grid upgrade could backfire, as his opponents are so aggressive with their attacks, and will be quick to label this more governmental waste.  That’s a perfectly possible — even probable response; no one doubts that the political atmosphere in Washington is poisonous, to say the least.

Having said that, the rationale for grid modernization, at least according to the article, is largely resilience and reliability in the face of an ever-increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, themselves the result of climate change.  It’s not too hard to convince people that outages are bad, and that protection against them is good.

But I would urge the author and his readers to take one further step back in their analysis, and recall that the cause of the climate change that’s causing the storms, i.e., an increase in green-house emissions, mostly from transportation and the generation of electricity, will itself be mitigated with a bigger and better grid.

How? Principally four things:

• Better efficiency and less waste, ultimately lowering costs by forestalling the construction of new power plants, as the need for redundant power sources is reduced

• Easier integration of renewables into the grid, by transmitting power longer distances from areas of over-supply to areas of greater load

• Integration of electric vehicles, charged by renewable energy, reducing emissions from gasoline and diesel

• The implementation of energy storage, further enabling the integration of more wind energy