The Matrix Overloaded: Clean Energy Will Depend on a New, ‘Smart’ Grid

Wind turbines and solar panels have become the icons of renewable energy. But renewable energy is only as effective as the infrastructure that moves it around: the electrical grid.

Cool devices to harness pollution-free energy won’t do much to lessen the country’s fossil-fuel dependence unless aging and unsophisticated infrastructure is vastly updated to transmit it.


Even at today’s levels, renewable energy is straining an electrical grid already showing signs of fragility, as evidenced by the 2003 blackout that turned out the lights from Connecticut to Michigan. In Texas, which has more installed wind-power capacity than any other state, wind turbines sometimes are ordered shut off because the state’s electrical lines can’t handle the surge of fresh juice. In California, energy from strong solar rays are stranded far from thirsty markets because of a shortage of transmission lines.

The challenge of modernizing the electrical grid to accommodate cleaner energy rivals the monumental task of extending the grid into rural America in the 1930s and building a fleet of new power plants in the wake of World War II.

“We may need to do it again in a different way if we’re really going to take advantage of these resources,” says Dan Reicher, who directed the Department of Energy’s alternative-energy programs in the 1990s and now heads up renewable-energy policy and investment at Google Inc.’s nonprofit foundation, Google.org. Renewable energy, he says, “will indeed remain a boutique industry unless we build out the transmission lines.”

WSJ