When ticking clocks and shrinking budgets collide

Making our energy grids smarter and our cities sustainable is a daunting challenge however you look at it. In the US alone, the energy infrastructure has more than 500,000 miles of high-voltage lines, with many more miles of distribution lines, 3,200-plus electric utilities and over 16,000 power plants and generating units across the country.

Simply replacing ageing parts of the infrastructure takes time and money. While there’s a normal replacement cycle for all the elements that make up the grid (meaning things do gradually get upgraded over time), upgrading infrastructure grid-wide to the latest and greatest smart technologies will cost even more.

The time aspect, too, is growing more problematic as the impacts of climate change become increasingly disruptive, with extreme weather events damaging more homes, roads, power lines and industries. Rising targets for emissions reductions and renewable energy will also keep adding pressure to decarbonise and smarten up society quickly.

Yet while all this is happening, long-term government investment in clean energy and smart technology is looking shaky.

In the UK, the Feed-in Tariff that offers incentives for solar, wind and other renewable-energy installations has proven successful at what it was intended to do — boost the nation’s clean-energy capacity. But, although the program is not even one year old yet, the new coalition government has announced plans to review it … meaning things might be changed sooner than expected.

US President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has unveiled a proposed budget for 2012 that would cut about $3.6 billion in subsidies for the fossil fuel industries. An additional $418 million in savings would come through a plan to reduce funding for the Department of Energy’s fossil energy program. Good news so far for a smarter energy future, right?

But the added funding levels being floated for renewable energy research aren’t all that great — $64 million for offshore wind energy, $59 million for geothermal energy — with the exception of $425 million for the SunShot solar concentrating thermal development initiative (whose goal it is to cut the cost of solar energy by 75 per cent before 2020). And even those amounts have lawmakers on the right and the left freaking out.

Setting priorities for a smart-energy future, it seems, isn’t as important to some as continuing to pump cash into the energy that is leaving us, the energy that should leave us and the energy that might not ever get here in time. If that sort of thinking doesn’t change, though, we won’t have the regulatory — and financial — foundation we need to make our grids as smart as they need to be.