Envisioning a new, interconnected energy system

It's a summer day a few years from now. Some things are familiar - for one, you're stuck in a Philadelphia heat wave. Other things aren't.

You drive your plug-in hybrid car to work. At 3 p.m., when no one's home, your smart electric meter notices that power prices are rising. The meter switches your air-conditioner into energy-saving mode. No human intervention necessary.

At 4 p.m., also automatically, the smart electrical grid notices that same spiking demand, and sends a signal to your company's meter. The lights dim almost imperceptibly, and three pieces of machinery shift into maintenance mode. Sure, output drops for the day, but your business comes out ahead because it sells unneeded power back into the system as demand peaks.

At 5:30, you pull back into your garage and plug your car into its outlet. But with energy demand still high, the car battery doesn't start charging. Instead, it discharges some of its stored power into the grid, helping cool your neighborhoods' homes and control your own monthly bill.

This isn't reality today. But if the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act works as planned, it should soon be a few billion dollars closer.

Last week, when President Obama signed the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, he said it would help create "a newer, smarter electric grid" - a grid that he said "will make our energy bills lower, make outages less likely, and make it easier to use clean energy."

The bill targets $4.5 billion for modernizing the grid, among $65 billion in energy spending and tax credits. It won't buy a whole new power grid - far from it. But proponents, including high-tech businesses and environmental groups, hope it will speed the process and spur a wave of new energy investments.

The next major step would be winning passage of a new energy-policy bill, which congressional Democrats hope to deliver later this year. The biggest hurdle may be the need to streamline the politically tough process of finding routes for new high-voltage transmission lines - crucial to fulfilling the vision, shared by Obama, environmentalists and energy magnate T. Boone Pickens, of bringing wind power from Texas and the Plains to the Great Lakes and East Coast.