Before it can become smart and efficient enough to accommodate a brave new world of electric cars and renewable energy, today’s electricity grid needs a big fix for its currently hobbled state.

While “smart” suggests shiny, modern and fast, the current electricity infrastructure in places like the US is anything but. Grid congestion has been growing steadily worse, while blackouts have been becoming both bigger and more frequent. Many energy grids are also peppered with security holes that leave them vulnerable to data theft, tampering and large-scale cyber-attacks. As it stands today, much of the grid is barely crawling, much less running, toward our smart-future goals.

Part of the problem is the drastic drop — a whopping 74 per cent between 1993 and 200 0– in spending on research and development in the electric power sector in recent years, notes S. Massoud Amin, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota. The result has been an equally drastic decline in grid performance.

Over the past 15 years, Amin writes in the journal IEEE Spectrum, average annual outages in the US ranged from a total of 92 minutes in the Midwest to 214 minutes in the Northeast.

“Japan, by contrast, averages only 4 minutes of interrupted service each year,” he writes.

Network security issues only deepen the cause for concern, with half of utility companies already reporting experiencing 150-plus cyber-attacks per week, according to a recent report from Accenture on “Critical infrastructure protection for the smart grid.”

“Only with a strong security framework will utilities and governments be able to unlock the full potential of the smart grid,” the report concludes.

In addition to beefed-up security, the electricity grid will need a much stronger transmission backbone, along with new and efficient local microgrids and self-healing capabilities, Amin says. While the estimated cost for such improvements in the US alone sounds staggering — $165 billion to $170 billion — the benefits in saved energy expenses could amount to some $20.4 billion a year, meaning the upgrades would pay for themselves in just over eight years. (And that’s not counting the added benefit of reduced carbon emissions, Amin notes.)

In its last report card, released in late 2009, on US infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) pointed to a few recent improvements that had raised the nation’s grade for the electricity grid to a D+. While that grade might not be failing, it’s certainly far from smart.

“Unless substantial amounts of capital are invested over the next several decades in new generation, transmission, and distribution facilities, service quality will degrade and costs will go up,” the ASCE remarked. “These investments will involve new technologies that improve the existing electric system and possibly advanced technologies that could revolutionise the electric grid.”

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