ELECTRANET COULD SEE LIGHT OF DAY 'SMART GRID' TECHNOLOGY COMING INTO REAL WORLD.

Byline: LISA FRIEDMAN

Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- With his new-found movie star clout, former Vice President Al Gore has begun an aggressive environmental crusade for ground-breaking technology and policy changes to the nation's electricity grid.

Using the momentum of his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, Gore is advocating a decentralized "smart grid" that would allow anyone to set up their own generator and buy or sell surplus electricity without caps.

Such an "Electranet" would eliminate the need for new-generation plants, spark widespread use of renewable energy and, ultimately, beat back global warming.

"In the same way the Internet took off and stimulated the information revolution, we could see a revolution all across this country with small-scale generation of electricity everywhere," Gore told a House committee on climate change last week.

Futuristic as it may sound, experts say that despite resistance from utilities and sluggish state bureaucracies, newly designed distribution grids could be just a decade away.

And California, which long ago began crediting customers for generating solar and wind electricity, is leading the nation.

Last year Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law the Million Solar Roofs bill, written by Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Culver City. Beyond building a million solar roofs in the next decade, the law also increases the credit that customers can get for generating their own solar energy.

Meanwhile, the state also has moved to decouple utility revenues from sales as a way to promote energy efficiency.

Going green

In the Southland, about 5,000 Southern California Edison customers are now generating their own power, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has installed 600 solar systems that allow users to get credit for producing excess electricity.

"What Gore is talking about is not fantasy," said Joe Ramallo, spokesman for the LADWP.

"California is the first state to understand that we need to rethink the social contract between the public and the utilities," added Reid Detchon, executive director of Energy Future Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based group of energy executives and environmentalists.

When it comes to creating a smart grid, Detchon said, "California is furthest down the road."

You can see it in the home of Jim Chuda, a green architect whose ecologically safe Hollywood Hills home features recycled aluminum bathroom tiles, energy-efficient ceiling fans and insulation made from old blue jeans.

A battery backup that looks like a chrome refrigerator sits in Chuda's garage and automatically maximizes the use of his solar panels by ensuring the electricity generated by them is used first, before any is taken from the grid.

"If I'm providing more power than I'm using, then I would turn the power back," he explained.

Chuda's grid-tiered battery backup, known as GridPoint Connect, is among a slew of intelligent energy management innovations that have the power to let any home or business become a net provider of electricity back to the grid.

"Most of the technology sits on a shelf today," said Kurt Yeager, former president of the Electric Power Research Institute. "It's just a matter of incentivizing the system to change."

Yeager, who now heads the Galvin Electricity Initiative, a campaign to create a new power system, noted that today's electricity grid is antiquated.

With strung wires, transformers hanging at meters and overbuilt infrastructure designed to accommodate peak usages, electricity is -- as activists have long pointed out -- the last industry to digitize.

Designing a system that allows your dishwasher or refrigerator to sense changes in the power grid and automatically reduce a home's electricity consumption, or let homeowners see how many kilowatts of electricity they are using at any given minute, is close to a reality.

The difficult part is changing the system.

"Anything that improves efficiency becomes a business problem," Yeager said, noting that outside of California, utilities are compensated based on the number of kilowatt hours they sell, not on efficiency.

But he and others maintain that rising electricity prices -- coupled with continually improving technology that uses sensors, controls and information technology to precisely manage electricity flows -- will spark monumental changes.

"The kind of thing Gore is talking about might start to happen," said Steven Hauser, executive director of the GridWise Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of companies focused on modernizing the country's power grid through new technologies.

"People will say, 'I can put a fuel cell over here, or I could sell electricity to this neighborhood,'" Hauser said.

Getting rid of caps

Gore, however, goes even one step further: advocating the elimination of caps.

Currently, even in California, customers generating their own electricity don't actually get a check from their local utilities. Rather, they are granted credit against electricity they may use during peak or other times.

Gerry Torribio, customer generation manager at Southern California Edison, said he didn't want to comment on the idea of eliminating caps. But he warned that decentralizing electricity generation comes with costs.

"The challenge of utilities and regulators is to strike a balance between the environmental and costs," he said.

The fact that small solar and wind projects still get state subsidies, he noted, is an indication that they are still evolving in the marketplace.

Even Yeager called the idea of eliminating caps political hyperbole.

Still, he and others stressed that as technologies evolve, new business models to compensate utilities likely will as well.

The result, many said, will be a cleaner earth.

"If you allow this flexible, adaptable system to allow local solutions to flourish, you will get a lot more solar and clean energy systems," Hauser said.

lisa.friedman(at)langnews.com

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(color) Architect Jim Chuda's home features a Gridpoint system solar panel that helps generate and preserve energy in L.A.

Alex Collins/Special to the Daily News