President Obama made the overhaul of the nation's electrical infrastructure a vocal part of his 2008 campaign. In an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow just days before the election, he outlined his promise of involvement:
"One of, I think, the most important infrastructure projects that we need is a whole new electricity grid. Because if we're going to be serious about renewable energy, I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago. And we're going to have to have a smart grid. If we want to use plug-in hybrids, then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that's generated from those car batteries, back into the grid. That can create 5 million new jobs, just in new energy.
But, it's huge projects that, generally speaking, you're not going to have private enterprise would want to take all those risks. And we're going to have to be involved in that process."
Last week, the administration finally made good on its promises, announcing an award of $3.4 billion in grant money to 100 cities, utilities, equipment makers, systems developers and other organizations around the country (out of 390 applications). The grants were awarded in six different project areas: advanced metering infrastructure, customer systems, electric distribution systems, electric transmission systems, equipment manufacturing and integrated and/or crosscutting systems.
Ranging in size from just under $400,000 to $200 million, each grant represents only a fraction of the proposal's estimated cost. But in every case, there are matching resource commitments from other sources, bringing the actual fully funded investment from the program to over $8 billion.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy
The projects are all over the map—both literally and figuratively. Rather than a government handout to a few obvious, entrenched players, the funding will be sprinkled across multicompany collaborations and private/public partnerships.
In particular, the money will buy millions of smart electric meters at a hodgepodge of utilities, pushing new tech into the field and even newer tech out of the lab and into commercial testing.
