Part 2: Smart Grid Came to Rescue in Hurricane Sandy

Our financial evaluation of investments in a sustainable future are complex, as you can see below in the context of building out smart and microgrids.  We see money is running out from the 2009 Recovery Act, in terms of upgrading our grids, so we are faced with a decision to extend from there or pull back and stop modernizing.

What would be your choice?  Can we afford not to move away from centralized power with failed transmission lines and facilities?  Will global warming put us in harm's way of more storms and more costly outages?

We believe the better ROI is to invest in this available technology, to build redundancy in our power-supply systems, and to better manage energy and cuts loss and waste.  Do you agree?

Here's the balance of the story:

"The 2009 Recovery Act included $11 billion to upgrade the grid, the first investments in a US smart grid. But those funds will soon be depleted and increasingly frequent storms make it obvious that further aggressive investments are necessary. $1.5 trillion over the next 20 years are needed to modernize the grid, according to Mark Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Long term, the key to a smart grid is moving from centralized to decentralized energy. "Solar panels on your house, geothermal heat pumps, small-scale but not home-scale technologies that are nearby," notes Peter Fox-Penner at consulting firm Brattle Group. "The less distance the power has to travel, the less vulnerability we will have to power lines coming down.

After Katrina, Lewis Milford, President of the Clean Energy Group, made the same recommendations he offers today:

Federal Level:

• Require federal mission critical facilities to use clean energy technologies.


• Require direct use of on-site clean energy technologies in reconstruction of critical public buildings.


• Develop federal-state partnerships to fund installations and facilitate joint procurement.

State & Local Levels

• Investigate local opportunities to use on-site clean energy technologies at emergency shelters, first responder stations, and on other critical infrastructure sites.


• Legislatures could require installation of on-site clean energy technologies at state mission critical facilities.


• Create state incentives to support use of clean energy technologies at public facilities.


• Establish incentives for the private sector to install new on-site clean energy protection at hospitals and university laboratories.

"Those laws should require some form of technology innovation, so we move beyond our almost sole reliance on diesel generators that often fail, time and again. We need policies to encourage public and private facilities to do more to put new technologies like solar with batteries and fuel cells at customer locations, to create power onsite when the lines are down. Because the power lines will come down again, and the status quo is not working," he says.

His organization recently launched the Clean Energy + Bond Finance Initiative to get these critical partnerships going.  

New York's new Energy Highway Blueprint appropriates $250 million for smart grid technologies to "create the most advanced energy management control center in the US."