A supervisor works in the grid control center at the Southern California Edison electric company in 2007.

Washington — Following the lead of some European and Pacific Rim nations, U.S. government technical and regulatory agencies, electric utilities, energy service providers and private companies are working to turn the nation’s century-old electric power grid into a 21st-century “smart grid”.

The job involves transforming a patchwork infrastructure — built, for the most part, before microprocessors retooled the industrial landscape — into an interoperable distributed network that interacts with consumers, detects and fixes its own problems and seamlessly integrates solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.

The full transformation will take 20 years to 25 years and require a total restructuring of the U.S. electric power infrastructure, but the work has begun and the Obama administration is backing the change with $4.5 billion of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law February 17.

“The investment we're making today,” President Obama said during the signing in Colorado, “will create a newer, smarter electric grid that will allow for broader use of alternative energy.”

KILOWATT HOURS

Nothing about the job will be easy, several energy specialists involved in the massive undertaking told America.gov. The system — the largest interconnected machine on Earth and one of the 20th century’s most significant engineering achievements — is a centrally planned and controlled infrastructure that stretches across 50 states, each of which has its own regulations and technical processes.

Over the years, and especially during the past decade, portions of the grid’s physical components have been upgraded and wired — technology built in the 1960s and 1970s is now overlaid with a growing information technology infrastructure and Internet-based technologies. These increase the grid’s operational capacity but also open it to cyberattacks.

Today in the United States, electricity typically is generated at large, centrally located power plants by steam- or water-driven turbines. The power is ramped up to high voltages for long-distance transmission, and high-voltage lines transmit the electricity to substations where it is reduced to the lower voltages used in homes and buildings.

The electricity then passes through a series of switches to distribution lines and is delivered to customers through local lines. Power companies meter the amount of electricity used and bill customers based on their use.

On average, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), a typical U.S. household uses 920 kilowatt hours per month. (A kilowatt hour is a unit of energy equivalent to one kilowatt of power expended for one hour of time.) The average cost of electricity in the United States is about $.10 per kilowatt-hour, but that cost is increasing due to rising fuel costs and more frequent electrical outages.

A repairman works on utility poles at sunrise in Gulfport, Misssisipi, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Because of the aging U.S. grid, “there has been a 3 percent per year increase in outage duration and a 4 percent per year increase in outage frequency over the past five years,” Robert Gilligan, vice president for transmission and distribution at GE Energy Infrastructure, part of the General Electric Co., told a congressional committee February 25. “Power outages and power quality disruptions cost U.S. businesses more than $100 billion per year.” These costs are passed along to consumers.

“If we stay on the path we’re on today,” Steve Pullins, president of Horizon Energy Group, told America.gov, “it’s likely that we’re going to see a 50 percent to 100 percent increase in electricity every seven years for the foreseeable future.”

AN EXAMPLE IN DENMARK

In the mid-1980s, Pullins said, Denmark had one of the highest electricity rates in Europe — $.12 or $.13 per kilowatt hour with a projected price of $1.00 by 2005, an estimate that was projected to bankrupt the country.

Like the United States today, Denmark at that time had large centralized power plants and imported electric power and natural gas from Germany and Sweden. The small Scandinavian nation also was building its commercial wind power business.

“[The Danes] decided they needed to do something radically different,” Pullins said. “They combined their variable wind resource with relatively small combined heat and power plants [CHPs] — natural-gas-based plants that produce electricity and steam or hot water for heating.

“If the wind came down, they could increase the output from their CHPs,” Pullins said. “In the past 20 years, they’ve gone from a few central, large generating plants to a very distributed system. They use 4-megawatt and 10-megawatt and 25-megawatt CHPs distributed geographically around the country like wind is distributed geographically.”

The Danes also distributed the wind-CHP units according to power levels — high-voltage units and lower-voltage units — allowing them to arrange the wind-CHP sources into cells that could be combined into clusters according to the size and needs of each area.

Today in Denmark, consumers pay about $.20 per kilowatt hour. The nation still depends on external sources for natural gas, but it exports electricity to Germany and Sweden.

Pullins considers Denmark’s evolution one of the best examples of government and private industry working together to transform electric service. “I think it’s a good example for the United States,” he added, “because here we are 20 years later and we’re going through the same agonizing challenges that Denmark did in the mid-1980s.”

Pullins said the U.S. regulatory structure and different requirements of 50 states would make such a move more difficult in the United States, but the opportunities would be great.

“None of these transitions is going to be easy,” he said. “They’re going to be difficult in terms of regulations and policy and technology, but we can’t get to some of the overall national goals unless we do these things. We just have to”.

More information about the smart grid is available on the Department of Energy Web site.