Policy priorities for managing T&D evolution.
Timothy D. Heidel is a postdoctoral associate, John G. Kassakian is professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Richard Schmalensee is Howard W. Johnson professor of management and economics, all at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kassakian and Schmalensee were co-chairs of the MIT Future of the Electric Grid study cited in this article, and Heidel was the study’s research director. Their colleagues involved with that study haven’t reviewed this article, so the authors acknowledge responsibility for its contents. A few years ago, former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson characterized the U.S. electric grid, the system of physical and human systems linking generators to loads, as “third-world.”1 More recently, others have claimed that smart grid technologies promise to “spur the kind of transformation the Internet has already brought to the way we live, work, play and learn.”2
A few years ago, former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson characterized the U.S. electric grid, the system of physical and human systems linking generators to loads, as “third-world.”1 More recently, others have claimed that smart grid technologies promise to “spur the kind of transformation the Internet has already brought to the way we live, work, play and learn.”2
Over the next two decades, when technologies known today will still dominate the grid, are we condemned to a deteriorating future of rising rates and more frequent blackouts, or will available smart grid technologies transform our lives as thoroughly as the Internet has? Having just completed a two-year study of the future of the U.S. electric grid with a dozen other economists and engineers,3 we have come to the conclusion that the grid’s future performance is far from predetermined; it will be shaped to a large degree by a few key choices made—or not made—at the state and federal levels and within the industry in the next few years.