A: One of the most valuable things the govt. could do(esp. our communicator in chief, Obama) is to reframe "smart grid." This is not a trivial matter. Al Gore's, "information super highway" helped launch public interest in the Internet in the early 90s."Smart grid" just doesn't do it. The very need for a "thought leadership gallery"to explain it to the masses, should be your first clue. Major technology innovations have to be scalable and commercializable, but they also have to communicatable ON A LARGE SACALE, too. In any case, smart grid is part of something larger which people can easily relate to -- and it's a phrase that's becoming more and more common already: distributed energy. We're all familiar with "hi-tension" lines and smoky power plants, have seen wind turbines, solar panels and such springing up for years now, and heard stories about people selling (or not) electricity back to the utility. And we've all experienced black outs of some sort. So it's not hard to understand that tying all these things together is going to be challenging and necessary. The need for both better monitoring and control (smartness) and storage around the grid is self evident, when seen in that light. But in the public's mind the defining innovation is the growing distributed nature of the electric infrastructure, not its smartness.