Australian intelligent grid project lacks oomph

A major collaborative research venture wants to smarten the electric grid in Australia. The trouble is, $3 million over three years may make for good PR, but doesn't deliver the kind of serious money needed to tackle the big challenge.

This week, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research in Australia outlined a three year, $3 million collaborative research venture between government and university research centers focused on developing technology for a smart grid.

Australian government officials refer to the project as the Intelligent Grid Cluster. It's designed to spur innovation and help tackle the monumental challenges of building a next generation smart grid.

In the research project, the officials outlined nine research projects focused on making those power stations cleaner as well as exploring how to generate energy closer to the energy consumers.

The basic definition of the intelligent grid is it links electricity with communications and computer control to create a highly automated, responsive and resilient power delivery system, according to the U.S. Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI).

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), which is heading up the effort, said 80 percent of energy consumed in Australia is generated from large centralized carbon intensive, coal based power stations.

No doubt, the rich combination of university researchers and government is the right combination. The idea is that the combination of expertise of federal government and major universities, the Intelligent Grid Cluster group believes the nine separate research projects will be able to model the market benefits for large scale deployment of distributed energy. In doing so, government officials believe the economic advantages of using intelligent grid architectures will provide obvious energy savings.

But some $3 million Australian is a drop in the bucket in moving the much needed intelligent grid forward.