What’s Happening With The Smart Grid: A Q&A With Industry Expert David Leeds !!!

What’s Happening With The Smart Grid: A Q&A With Industry Expert David Leeds
Posted on Wednesday November 4th by Alex Padalka

Last week, Obama announced more than $3 billion in stimulus grants to improve and “smarten” the national grid. To get some insight into what to make of this major development, we chatted with David Leeds, an analyst specializing in grid technology at Greentech Media. He recently authored a free 145-page report called The Smart Grid in 2010, has lectured on the subject at MIT, Stanford, and The Wharton School of Business.

Q: What do most Americans not understand about smart grids?

A: Well, frankly, the term “smart grid” has yet to enter the pop lexicon, and so generally speaking Americans are still unaware of the concept and its enormous potential to dramatically increase energy efficiency, system reliability, and the amount of renewable energy plugged into the grid.
Electricity generation is the number-one contributor to greenhouse gases, and smart grid may represent the largest single IT investment that can be made to reduce CO2 (and other GHG) emissions. That is something that Americans have yet to be clued in to, although the message is quickly spreading, and having President Obama mention the term “smart grid” on the Letterman show certainly helps.

There have actually been many such moments in the past six months, another one being when John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco, stated that the smart grid market “may be bigger than the whole Internet.” The word is getting out…