'Smart Grid' Presents Great Promise, Complications

Hired by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop a road map of standards and find a consensus on a plan, Mansoor's group will help the institute, Secretary Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke jump-start the process in early May.

The potential problems are daunting: "It will be a mess," Mansoor says, if auto manufacturers each come up with a unique standard for how plug-in hybrid technology will communicate with the smart grid - reminiscent of the "VHS vs. Beta-max war" of the early 1980s. To avoid that, the electric utility industry is working with automotive engineers to develop plug-in standards.

Demand for electricity is predicted to grow 30 percent by 2020, placing yet more stress on the grid and increasing risk of blackouts. That's without the additional demand that would be generated by the 1 million plug-in hybrids Obama has envisioned putting on the roads by 2015.

"Today an American consumer uses 13 times the electricity he or she did a half-century ago and there are twice as many of us," James Hoecker told a House energy subcommittee earlier this year. The former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, now counsel for WIRES, an electricity industry advocacy group, said: "We're asking the transmission system to perform tasks for which it was not designed."

Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says the "dumb and old energy distribution system" hasn't changed much from the days of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla at the turn of the 20th century. "Electricity in the grid is like water in pipes," Hendricks said. "You need to manage supply and demand. You have to keep the levels in balance, or the whole system crashes down."