The goal: A lean, mean energy machine

For all the growing recognition about the need for a smart grid, “smart” — ultimately — shouldn’t be our primary goal. “Lean” is what we really have to aim for.

Think about it: a smart, efficient grid could, in theory, support an ever-expanding consumer base with rising energy demands. Eliminating waste and boosting efficiency, as William Stanley Jevons discovered, doesn’t mean consumption goes down. In fact, if history since the beginning of the Industrial Age is any measure, consumption tends to go up as devices and processes become more efficient.

So why do we even care about efficiency? It’s because it lets us prevent consumption from going up as much as it could have.

That’s the “dirty little secret” utilities know about smart meters: while AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) technologies have been billed as way to help consumers save on their energy bills, smart meters are in fact a defense against rising energy costs, a way to prevent bills from growing as large as they might otherwise become. And energy costs will keep rising, thanks to the need to reduce carbon emissions and transition away from fuels that are polluting, in depletion or imported from global trouble spots.

With electricity growing ever more expensive and harder to come by, consumer-focused smart meters alone won’t be enough to balance demand with production. One reason: people aren’t always in the same places the energy is. In the US, for example, population is concentrated on the margins — the East and West coasts — while future energy sources like wind and solar are found in more interior spots like the breezy Great Plains and the arid, sunny Mojave Desert. Linking the two will take a more intelligent, interconnected infrastructure, which is the aim of projects like Tres Amigas.

As overall energy supplies grow more constrained in the face of unbridled demand growth, we’ll also need a way to distinguish between essential and non-essential consumption. People aren’t likely to switch off their air-conditioners en masse on a hot August night, but a smart grid could “know” to reduce power to such uses if it’s faced with the choice of keeping the lights on or crashing completely.

Think about energy like food, another thing too many of us consume too much of. We could all, as individuals, start cutting calories and eat less to achieve healthier weights … but our track record in that regard hasn’t been wowing up until now. However, when food across the board becomes harder to get — as it did, for instance, during Cuba’s “Special Period” after the fall of the Soviet Union — we’ve seen it’s possible to get by with less and lose weight, but not starve to death.

And that’s where the greatest promise for the smart grid lies: in enabling our electricity infrastructure to become a lean, mean machine that can eliminate energy “flab” but prevent society from power starvation.