After what seemed like a long wait, President Obama today announced Smart Grid Investment Grant awards totaling slightly over $3.4 billion for 100 projects to help build a smarter electric grid. The Recovery Act stimulus money will be matched by industry contributions for a total public/private investment of more than $8 billion. Now we know the “Who” and the “How Much.” . But we still don’t know the “What.” . We don’t yet know what technologies and products those 100 projects will use. And until we know that, we won’t know whether we’ve gotten our money’s worth.

Below we’ve given you a quick summary of what we do know, a quick warning about what we don’t, and links to our ongoing coverage so you can monitor the situation.

100 Smart Grid Stimulus Winners

The 100 recipients of the Smart Grid Investment Grant awards include private companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and others working with them. The rigorous DOE selection process yielded 25 large projects and 75 smaller ones in what the agency described as an extremely competitive process. In fact, only 25% of the 400 applicants won funding for their projects, leaving 300 of them wondering what they did wrong. Not counting the 2,800 or so utilities that didn’t even bother to apply.

Meters and Communications Are the Big Smart Grid Stimulus Winners

The grants range in size from $400,000 to $200 million and cover a dazzling variety of Smart Grid technologies. In addition to providing "tens of thousands of jobs," the money will cover the deployment of about 18 million smart meters. It will also pay for roughly one million home energy management displays, which will help consumers exercise more control over their energy use. And it will support expansion of the smart appliance market (such as dishwashers and washers and dryers) to give consumers even more control over their energy consumption.

Utilities also scored money to improve their antiquated distribution networks. For instance, money was given for 700 automated substations that will allow utilities to respond more quickly to weather-related outages. Grants were also given for the installation of about 200,000 advanced transformers that will enable utilities to monitor and switch out units before they fail.

Money was also allotted for the installation of 850 additional synchrophasors, giving the U.S. – at long last – 100% coverage of the national high-voltage transmission system. We can now hope that the U.S. will soon have a much needed “air traffic control system” for the grid. And that the U.S. may start to catch up with China’s state-of-the-art WAMS (wide area monitoring systems). That monitoring ability also will help the grid take on large amounts of renewable energy such as wind and solar power when they are available, and to make needed adjustments when those sources are not producing.

While the stimulus funds won't pay for new transmission lines, it will pay for transmission upgrades.

What We Don’t Know About Smart Grid Stimulus Grants

Although today’s announcement was welcome, we still need to know the rest of the story. More specifically, we need to know which technologies and products were selected by the winning utilities.

“The goal was to finance technology that would provide a foundation for years or even decades,” explains metering expert Dr. Aaron Snyder of EnerNex Corporation, a leading power engineering firm.  “But if utilities spend their money on proprietary technology that is not upgradable, they may have to replace it in a few years.”

The vision of an interoperable, plug-and-play power grid can’t come to pass if each of the country’s 3,000+ utilities is its own incompatible island of non-compliant technology.

The DOE said it would require projects to support open standards. But it has not published the winning applications, so we don’t know yet how stringently they enforced that rule. Although some utilities issued press releases revealing their choices of vendors and protocols, many did not.

What’s more, Smart Grid standards are in flux and we don’t know where DOE chose to draw the line. Snyder says utilities are particularly concerned about ANSI C12.22, a new ANSI standard that can be used for sending meter data over networks. “It may be okay to use a proprietary communications system as long as the data uses a standard model.” But even the ANSI standard data model defined by ANSI C12.19 is still a question in many minds. For instance, many utilities are unclear whether they should push vendors to support those ANSI standards or whether they should push for similar standards already in place by the IEC (the Switzerland-based International Electrotechnical Commission), in the IEC 62056 series.

We have assembled a bevy of resources to help you track these issues and make the right choices. First, we have an entire arsenal of stimulus tools and trackers, as detailed in the links below. Second, we’ve soft-launched a Smart Grid Standards channel, which will soon launch “formally” with expanded content from some of the nation’s top experts. And, of course, we’ll continue to post weekly in our email newsletter and daily to our Web site, our RSS feed, our Twitter feed, and our Facebook page.

As the Smart Grid stimulus picture comes into focus – as we learn the winners, the losers and the predominant technologies and standards – we’ll be here to deliver the information you need to make the right choices.

More on SGN:

   SGIG Awards by Category (pdf)

   SGIG Awards by State (pdf)

   Directory of Energy Awards

   Stimulus News Digest

   Smart Grid Standards Channel (beta)

PS: Also featured in this Special Issue:

   That $3.4 Billion? It’s Just a Fraction of the Stimulus Spend for Energy Projects

   There’s More Money Out There – And It’s Closer to Home

   Video: Obama Announces Millions for Smart Power Grid