Obama announces $3.4 billion investment in smart grid
rates are lowest. This will help reduce energy bills for everyone by helping drive down “peak demand” and limiting the need for “stand-by” power plants - the most expensive power generation there is.
Making electricity distribution and transmission more efficient — $400 million. The administration is funding several grid modernization projects across the country that will significantly reduce the amount of power that is wasted from the time it is produced at a power plant to the time it gets to your house. By deploying digital monitoring devices and increasing grid automation, these awards will increase the efficiency, reliability and security of the system, and will help link up renewable energy resources with the electric grid. This will make it easier for a wind farm in Montana to instantaneously pick up the slack when the wind stops blowing in Missouri or a cloud rolls over a solar array in Arizona.
Integrating and crosscutting across different “smart” components of a smart grid — $2 billion. Much like electronic banking, the Smart Grid is not the sum total of its components but how those components work together. The administration is funding a range of projects that will incorporate these various components into one system or cut across various project areas — including smart meters, smart thermostats and appliances, syncrophasors, automated substations, plug in hybrid electric vehicles, renewable energy sources, etc.
Building a smart grid manufacturing industry — $25 million. These investments will help expand our manufacturing base of companies that can produce the smart meters, smart appliances, synchrophasors, smart transformers, and other components for smart grid systems in the United States and around the world — representing a significant and growing export opportunity for our country and new jobs for American workers.
The combined effect of the investments announced today, when the projects are fully implemented, will:
- Create tens of thousands of jobs across the country. These jobs include high paying career opportunities for smart meter manufacturing workers; engineering technicians, electricians and equipment installers; IT system designers and cyber security specialists; data entry clerks and database administrators; business and power system analysts; and others.
- Leverage more than $4.7 billion in private investment to match the federal investment.
- Make the grid more reliable, reducing power outages that cost American consumers $150 billion a year — about $500 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
- Install more than 850 sensors — called Phasor Measurement Units” — that will cover 100 percent
