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By Doug Peeples

SGN News Editor

Keeping up with what's going on in the energy and smart grid sectors can be a chore. We've picked three reports to help bring you up to speed on electric grid policy development, stabilizing an aging grid with smart grid transformer technologies, and what industry and academia are doing to protect advanced metering infrastructure from attacks.

The report defines two trends that are pushing policy makers toward reevaluating how to strengthen and modernize the electric grid: public interest in grid reliability and resilience in the wake of blackouts and weather-related outages in many parts of the country, and the changing mix of energy resources and the changes it is bringing to the energy market and state and federal energy or environmental policies.

BPC established the Electric Grid Initiative to tackle those issues and developed recommendations in four policy areas:

·         Encouraging efficient transmission and distribution investment

·         Advancing planning and operational coordination across jurisdictions

·         Enabling a more flexible and resilient system

·         Monitoring and enhancing operational reliability

As Hébert said, "The time is now to start addressing these issues. Outages are estimated to cost businesses roughly $79 billion each year in the United States. It makes good economic sense to invest now, so as to minimize the financial damages that result from outages."

And Boucher acknowledged that while it's tough to make progress in the current political environment, "I believe this report provides recommendations that policymakers from both parties can support."