More Than Just a Meter

The term "smart grid" is getting a lot of use these days, with related stimulus funding reaching into the billions of dollars and the popular press promising Jetson like advances, it has been predicted to enable our control of home appliances from our office desktops and allow us to supply electricity back to the grid and to use our plug in electric vehicles. What this sometimes hyperbolic coverage overlooks, however, are the many small tweaks that will add up to big reliability improvements for the larger transmission system, with fewer and shorter outages and irregularities, in a process that will be more evolutionary that revolutionary.