Recently in Smart grid Category

Some energy regulators are pretty much self-proclaimed "geeks" about their subject, but Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff may have taken his penchant for touting energy gadgets to a new level Thursday, as our colleague Tom Tiernan reports.

At a conference on one of his favorite subjects, demand response (which can't help also being about smart grid), Wellinghoff unselfconsciously displayed his home electricity usage -- in real time, as he spoke -- pointing out how different appliances in his home were kicking on without synchronization, creating a usage peak that could be shaped if only his house had better management technology or a home area network.

For all the talk of innovation in the electricity sector, there's precious little of it, at least the kind that resonates with ordinary people as something concrete they could actually use without a hassle. But David Crane at NRG Energy may have something.

One of NRG's plans, Crane said at a Credit Suisse energy conference Thursday, is to sell monthly contracts, like cell phone contracts, to customers of its Reliant Energy utility, for charging electric vehicles.

When your dad stalked around behind you turning off lights, lowering the thermostat, he was all about the utility bills. Since they were pretty theoretical -- and yes, we did understand that he wasn't made of money -- it just didn't carry much weight. When we grew up we would just not make so much of such a boring issue.

(Boring?? Barack Obama might argue. He just told a Home Depot audience in suburban DC that "insulation is sexy." Maybe his saying so will make it so.)

Pacific Gas and Electric is the classic, longtime "clean" utility -- almost no pollutant emissions. It just this week pulled out of the US Chamber of Commerce because of the chamber's tough skepticism about the need to regulate carbon emissions. But clearly, CEO Peter Darbee doesn't see company cleanness as any guarantee of future viability of a power utility.

Speaking at the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch utility conference in New York Tuesday, Darbee said climate change and renewable energy mandates are not the big challenges for the power industry. Instead, our correspondent Ethan Howland reports, he said distributed energy and smart meters present the much bigger threat to a business's way of life.

The smart grid may be only in the underachiever phase for longer than some might be thinking, even though the Obama administration is putting billions toward it, and promising jobs and savings in connection with it.

Patrick Gallagher, deputy director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Tuesday that "there is a bit of a jam right now" in figuring out which standards are most urgent to move on, and he said the organization hoped to have initial drafts of roadmaps ready this summer. Initial drafts of roadmaps.