Smart Grid over Whole Economy

While the US made some big economic mistakes in recent years, the billions they're now planning to throw at a smart electricity grid isn't one of them.
 
Their plan to reinvigorate the whole electricity sector using a mix of communication, generation and distribution technologies could potentially create millions of new jobs - something we should be watching very closely.
 
Even without the green impact - and I've talked about that in the past - a smart grid will repay itself over and over again.
 
No wonder you can't open a newspaper or go online these days without seeing a major company like Google, Microsoft, Intel or Cisco - to name only a few - singing the praises of a smart grid.
 
And they're not the only ones. The fact that government regulators have also joined the chorus suggests that the smart grid could provide a platform for major public and private investment, and partnership.
 
A new study by IBM backs me up on this.  They found that even a $10 billion investment in electricity infrastructure transformation in the States could generate over 200,000 jobs there.
 
While the stimulus to our economy would be more modest, the sort of jobs and companies something like a smart grid would generate would still be varied, skilled and innovative.
 
The debate in the US over the potential of the smart grid, both economically and environmentally, is huge these days. And that's something we need to be plugging into here as well.
 
John Fennell
jjfennell@copperdev.com