On Thursdays, April 8, 2010, Bill Parkhurst of Cisco Systems, presented a talk on the Smart Grid at the Kansas City section of the IEEE in Overland Park, KS.

Fundamentally, Bill said, the Smart Grid is whatever Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, says it is. He has $4.5B available to fund Smart Grid programs. How this money is used will define what the Smart Grid becomes.

From Cisco’s perspective, the Smart Grid is the network for information connectivity throughout the entire pathway from the utilities to the end user, to monitor and control energy production, transport and use to enable greater efficiencies.

He suggests that Cisco feels this network is bigger than the internet. As an example, there may be as many as 10 different monitor or control nodes in each residential house. This is more than 1.4 billion devices to be connected to the grid.

One of the challenges with creating a smart grid network is that each utility has its own system driven by its unique features and specific state regulations. This is a feature of the US energy creation and distribution system which is partly responsible for the mess we are in today.

Bill offered a very brief summary of the US electrical power generation system. There are over 3,000 utilities with assets valued at over $800B, and over 10,000 power plants, most of them 30-50 years old. We spend $247B annually on electricity.

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