The term “smart grid” is getting a lot of use these days, with
related stimulus funding reaching into the billions of dollars
and the popular press promising Jetsons-like advances; it has
been predicted to enable our control of home appliances from our
office desktops and allow us to supply electricity back to the
grid and to use our plug-in electric vehicles. What this
sometimes hyperbolic coverage overlooks, however, are the many
small tweaks that will add up to big reliability improvements
for the larger transmission system, with fewer and shorter
outages and irregularities, in a process that will be more
evolutionary than revolutionary. Popular attention has centered
on smart meters, the devices serving as the communications nexus
connecting utilities and customers in smart-grid planners’
schemes. It’s understandable the media would gravitate toward a
device with which consumers are already familiar, but this
approach overlooks the plethora of behind-the-scenes advances
required to give these new meters t