“At this moment, there’s something big happening in America when it comes to creating a clean energy economy.” So said Barack Obama in October of last year, before announcing $3.4 billion in grants to US companies to kick-start the building of a “smart” electric grid – an enormous infrastructure project intended to reduce the need for new power stations, utilise renewable power sources more effectively, improve energy security, and keep the cost of electricity down for consumers.
Smart grids are a modernization of traditional electricity grids, to utilise cheap new digital technology such as smart meters, smarter control systems, and other technical developments to increase efficiency and match supply and demand. As governments around the world follow the USA in allocating giant sums to fund their own smart grids, Fox-Penner’s Smart Power is as timely as it is authoritative.
The author, an economist and industry consultant, avoids the detailed description of either old or new electricity grid technologies that the reader might have been expecting. Instead he describes just enough to make possible an examination of the changes required to industry structure, regulation, and business models. And make no mistake, Fox-Penner believes that it is those changes, rather than the technological challenges ahead, that are critical to the success of smart grids.
Smart Power presents a thorough examination of each facet of that transformation in turn. From the options for long-term power generation, to the policy choices and regulatory reform needed to accomplish national goals, to new strategies for efficiency-focussed business models, Fox-Penner casts his eye over the entire power generation landscape identifying the many changes, and obstacles to change, on the path to the smart grid.
Fox-Penner is evangelistic about the need for change in the US energy industry. He identifies and discusses necessary changes in almost every corner of it and does so objectively, with the benefit of many years’ experience. He accepts the deployment of a smart grid as inevitable – either patchwork or well structured, and concludes that whether the US power industry can lead the nation to a new, more productive sustainable future depends on “the intelligence of the institutions we create, not that of hardware and software we deploy.”
Ours is a UK blog, and for many of our readers, the book’s thorough examination of US regulation, industry structure, and consumer reaction, though impressive, may not be immediately appealing. But the issues are the same on either side of the pond, and we can learn much from the US experience. The thoroughness and authority of the book stand out, and as both a popular policy and business strategy book, Smart Power is a compelling read for a wide range of audiences.
