subject: Smart Grid Technology: The Global Smart Vision [print this page] . Other countries are facing the same issues. Each country has its own vision of what a real "smart grid" is, and every country has a different time frame in mind for implementing these visions. China and India are already moving to "the next generation of networks and generation sources" (LaMonica 2007). Other countries that are on the cutting edge of the green movement and eco-technology will surely be in the forefront of the smart grid dash - it will not be long before one country or another is totally connected to a smart grid.
The more people that can be connected to a smart grid, the better it is for the environment and for individual energy consumers, but there are still drawbacks that must be considered.
There is almost no way that one universal smart grid would work. In the United States the debate about which model and which technology will work for each city, each state, or the whole country. If the United States cannot agree with each of its own states, how would it be able to agree globally?
Each country has different energy resources at its disposal. This makes some choices better than others. No one would ever suggest using solar power as a main energy source in damp and soggy parts of the world where sunshine is intermittent and fleeting at best. Wind power is great in some countries, but not in those places where the wind rarely blows hard enough to stir a scrap of paper on the ground, let alone turn a massive, metal turbine.
Each country has different economic and political aspirations. Not every country can afford to try to change to a smart grid of any kind at the present time; they are too busy trying to keep their populace from starving. In the United States, there are those who are dragging their feet on the smart grid idea simply because of the enormous cost involved. There is disagreement about who should come up with the funding and how it will work when it is actually in place.
Finally, there is disagreement on how to keep the smart grid secure from hackers and terrorists once it is installed. Security experts agree that with the many smart monitors and terminals needed for each grid system, breaches would be harder to stop and possibly harder to detect until it was too late.
Reference: Martin LaMonica, Staff Writer. Will Anyone Pay for the "Smart" power Grid? Posted May 16, 2007 at http://www.news.cnet.com/Will-anyone-pay-for-the-smart-power-grid, retrieved August 16, 2009 from same.
by: Ezra Drissman
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