I was at first comically dismayed at the inane response to the first real smart grid thread on Gristmill all about Austin's smart grid project  (they own their own grid!).

  Why complain though, it's another opportunity to repeat myself, yet again, in another fashion.  Maybe someone will comprehend something from my techo-bloggerel this time?  Hehey.

I guess I better get started then, making sense.

Consider distributed computing, remember Napster anyone?  Instead of a central server with computers connected to it, it was made up of computers acting as servers.  

A smart grid uses distributed generation and storage controlled by distributed computing to adjust demand to match supply.  

Consider the way a school of fish swims, how each fish keys off of the fish around it, then the whole school moves together.  The rules that the fish follow are simple, the activity of the whole school takes many supercomputers to model.  But inject the simple rules, called Fractals in mathematics theory, into a computer and it can simulate the action of a school of fish.

Fractal theory is used to model weather too.  And nuclear detonations.

With a smart grid computer, in your home, sensing the status of the grid and communicating that local status to the other smart grid devices in buildings and factories and metering and controlling the input from solar, wind, and biogas systems and storing energy as heat or cold in building mass, freezers, and hot water heaters, then the whole smart grid would manage to get all of us fish, little and big, to get along swimmingly right into a low cost, zero GHG energy future.

The big fish, like a huge wind farm or solar thermal plant, can be brought along with the school.  Big power calls for big storage, in millions of plugin hybrid batteries or in superconducting electromagnetic storage systems. The utility sdupply my power here was the first to use this storage technology on a utility scale.

Anyway, this is a rough explanation of how a distributed smart grid makes the old central power plant model obsolete.

Each home's power switched by a smart grid device that is sensing the demand and supply over the whole grid by communicating with the other devices.  Your heat would come on during low demand hours and ground source heat would be stored in your floor.  Or cold if you were in a hot climate.  

Your cothes would get washed at night and your dishes and your hot water would be heated and stored offpeak.  Your freezer would be cooled and the cold to refrigerate your food would be stored off peak.  Your plugin car would be charged offpeak.  So would home batteries to power your essential stuff during peak demand hours.

All the high energy demand applications in your home, all those things you need power for, would be done offpeak.  Simple, multiply it all out to every building, factory, and facility.  That's plenty of storage.

Smart grid devices would bill your account or credit it, depending on if you provided power or used it, or stored it for the grid in your batteries.  The government would regulate this actual free market in electricty, freeing it up from monopoly control.  

Sounds like a good idea to me.