NIST

Because today's energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies lack connective infrastructure, they provide only first steps toward climate change mitigation.

Quantitatively they only make dents. This applies to building efficiency methods, such as improved lighting and insulation, and transportation efficiency methods such as higher fuel economy standards. The same for onshore wind and concentrated solar thermal, the first (after hydro) competitively-priced renewable technologies. In almost all cases, they lack integration with long distance or even local distribution systems to reach their markets.

These limitations are the main reasons a “smart” electrical grid, empowered by $4.5 billion in federal stimulus funds, is starting to graduate from R&D into products and services.

It's not an easy transition, though, as it surfaces large technology challenges as well as the positions of competing business sectors, technologies, and interests, and the less Machiavellian problems of industries that are working together for the first time. Splashing around now in one pool are the electrical utility, energy feedstock, information technology, building design and management, transportation, and electrical devices and appliances sectors.

With so much taxpayer money involved, President Obama's energy team is mandating up-front standards to ensure that what is built by these disparate forces works and is efficient.

The initial results illustrate the technology and business challenges, but also, a culture of innovation and the experience in business and industrial reinventions of the IT sector.

As the United States sped along the Information Superhighway through the 1990s, it left its electricity grid in the dust.

Now, energy efficiency has become an imperative, and momentum is building to merge information and power into a smart grid that can promote energy efficiency and savings.

Miami became the one of the largest U.S. cities to embrace that shift last month when it announced it would invest $200 million in smart meters for homes. Boulder, Colo., Austin, Texas, Southern California Edison and Duke Energy Indiana are also planning smart grids or smart metering programs.

The federal government is getting on board, too. President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu regularly talk about a smart grid future – built by U.S. innovators. Congress this year has already invested $4 billion in smart grid technology in the stimulus package alone, and federal agencies are getting to work designing an overhaul of the power system.

Smart grid technology will eventually revolutionize how we generate, distribute and consume energy on both macro and micro levels.

To get there, however, the nation will have to get over some significant technological and institutional hurdles.