How “not smart” is today’s electricity grid? Consider the answer most of us still hear on the phone when reporting an outage: “Look outside and see if your neighbours’ lights are on.”

State-of-the-art, self-healing, “Jetsons”-style power that’s not.

Based as it is on technology that was basically around 100 years ago, today’s grid has a long way to go before it’s “smart” enough to accommodate a future of electric cars, renewable energy sources and climate-focused carbon reduction requirements. Even tacking on a army of home-based smart meters won’t be enough alone to get us there.

However, smart grid company Echelon today unveiled a new system that makes it possible for utilities to communicate with myriad low-voltage devices that operate across power networks but don’t currently “talk” when load stresses and other problems arise. The Echelon Control System (ECoS) software and Edge Control Node (ECN) 7000 hardware series will bring a whole new level of intelligence to utility companies’ distribution and transmission networks, says Jeff Lund, Echelon’s vice president of business development.

“We’re taking smart grid beyond smart metering,” Lund said. “We’re pushing intelligence to the edge of the grid.”

That edge is everything that lies between a utility’s power plants and the customer’s home, all the transformers and other devices that are the critically important middlemen in getting electricity from source to destination. More than enabling these devices to now communicate with electric companies, Echelon’s new software and hardware are designed to be open, modular and easily upgradable.

U.S.-based Duke Energy, the nation’s third-largest electricity provider, has signed on as Echelon’s first customer for the ECoS/ECN offering.

Lund says the open-platform ECoS software will enable developers and vendors to create whatever applications a utility wants to operate on top of the system, allowing for a whole new generation of add-ons akin to the zillions of apps available for iPhones. And the hardware will be able to work as easily with assets deployed 10 years ago as with those to be installed a decade down the road.

Lund calls it “future proofness.”

“It’s not just about date transport,” he says. “It’s control.” The combination of new hardware and software, Lund says, will let utilities not only receive information from devices on the grid, but help them identify and resolve potential problems before they become overwhelming and lead to service interruptions.

That sort of control will be increasingly vital in years to come as utilities are forced to deal with a host of new challenges: incorporating more energy from wind and solar sources, managing power plants to curb carbon emissions and meeting all of today”s service demands while also preparing to accommodate a growing generation of plug-in electric vehicles. While some parts of the world are further along than others in confronting such issues — Denmark, for example, already leads the world in the proportion of electricity from distributed (ie, small-scale) sources of energy like solar panels — utility companies around the globe see change coming, Lund says.

“The problems of Denmark today are the problems of Ohio tomorrow,” he says.

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