Smart Grid blueprint

06Oct09

Last night I attended a talk at Olin College in Needham, MA.  The speaker, John McDonald, is the General Manager of Marketing for GE’s Transmission and Distribution Division and former President of the IEEE Power and Energy Society.

Sitting among 50 or 60 IEEE members, I felt conspicuously young and under-dressed (having driven two hours straight from class at UMASS Amherst), but I also felt a different type of self-awareness.  Why wasn’t the place packed with other eager, ambitious, forward-thinking, tech oriented neo-capitalist environmentalists?  Why was I one of maybe six or seven other students?

The content of the talk was thorough, yet accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of Smart Grid concepts.  I may have been the only person who took detailed notes, which I’ve included below with some additional commentary, but what I observed last night was, at least to me, of a more fundamental concern than the concepts and ideas discussed.

Where is the clamoring, competitive, entrepreneurial and environmental urgency among my peers?  The potential of Smart Grid to provide a foundation for new business models, new jobs, new wealth, new

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