The Case for Brainy Power

How would this help people?
One of the challenges that the electric grid has is how to provide power on a hot day in the summer: since everybody's using power at that point, we frequently see brownouts and sometimes blackouts. If the grid could be in constant communication with your air conditioner, we could avoid these kinds of problems, and you might get paid in exchange for allowing your air conditioner to be cycled on and off in relatively imperceptible ways. If we had real-time pricing of electricity—that is, pricing for people that reflects different costs throughout the day—you would have a choice: wash and dry your clothes at noon on a hot day, which will cost you x dollars, or wait six to eight hours when it will cost you a quarter of that. Over time, we are going to have smarter appliances and equipment in our homes. But all this is going to take increasing investment in the grid.

What will that investment get us?
For one, we need what are called smart meters. These are meters that record real-time information and can send it over the Internet to utilities, and then get it directly to consumers. You wouldn't expect to go into a grocery store and do your shopping and not know what the prices for anything were and only get a bill at the end of the month. We need to get to a point where people have a lot more sense about what we're paying for energy at any given point, and more choice about where it comes from and how green it is.

Sounds wonderful, but it also sounds like something involving a patchwork of overlapping governments and regulators. Is it likely that we could actually get to the point you ' re describing?
Yes. As I said, one of the critical needs is intelligent meters, and those are beginning to be installed. State utility regulators are encouraging utilities to purchase and install large numbers of them. We're not where countries like Italy are—they've installed smart meters across the entire country—but we're moving in that direction. I also think the economic attractiveness of being able to better monitor and control your own energy use, whether you're a homeowner or a factory operator, is going to motivate people, especially in an era of higher energy prices.

Google uses enormous amounts of energy in its server farms. Wouldn ' t part of the new energy future require you to do better on that front?
Absolutely. The energy work we're doing will also help Google to green up its own operations. It turns out that responding to millions of Google searches uses a fair amount of electricity. We've made some good progress in making those facilities more efficient, and we are looking for greener sources of electricity.

If you are asked to be secretary of energy in the Obama administration, what would be the first thing you ' d do?
I think one of the things we clearly need to do is put a price on carbon emissions to control greenhouse gases. That would send the right price signals to the economy and drive the trillions of dollars of investment that will have to be made both to avert the climate crisis and to rebuild our economy.

© 2008