Main Street Communities can lead Prosumer energy revolution

                                                                Photo courtesy of John Schalk

Municipal Leaders Tour ComEd Oak Park Intelligent Sub-Station

 Would you like to reduce the amount of electricity you use to save on your utility bill?  Would you like to see our economy improve? Are you up for helping to reduce the threat of climate change, or experience fewer power outages of shorter duration? Please raise your hand if you would like to someday earn money by safely producing electricity at your home or business?

If you answered yes to one or more of the above questions, you need to support the effort to dramatically upgrade our electricity grid in Oak Park, Chicagoland, and throughout the USA.

We have seen how digital technology has revolutionized the world’s communications infrastructure over the past three decades; creating millions of jobs in doing so. It is now time to apply new digital and energy technologies to the energy grid in order to unleash another wave of innovation that will also improve the economy.

Improving the economy is worth doing for its own sake, but get this, building the smart grid will also help us slow climate change, and lay the groundwork for energy consumers (you and I) to someday soon contemplate producing our own energy, storing it, or selling it back to the grid.

Futurist Alvin Toffler has coined the upcoming energy transformation as the era of the pro-sumer, when citizens can both produce as well as consume electricity – a commodity nearly as vital as air and water to our daily economic lives.

Because of local passion in support of this vital initiative, Oak Park is one of the first communities in Chicagoland to have smart electric meters installed in every home and business in Oak Park. Oak Park is now also home to ComEd’s first intelligent sub-station. Although ComEd has 240 more sub-stations to upgrade, (at $ 5 million + each) intelligent grid sub-stations monitor the grid digitally to help prevent power outages and play a vital role in re-routing power quickly when outages occur, thereby reducing both the number and duration of power outages.

From Mainstreet to the moon, building out the smart grid with a sense or urgency should perhaps be our highest public policy infrastructure priority.

We in Oak Park see and understand the consumer, environmental, and powerful economic benefits of building the smart grid. Governor Quinn, the legislature and ComEd need to work out a compromise and approve a way to finance and move forward with building out the smart grid in Chicagoland.   

It appears for this to happen the media and public needs to start understanding the strategic importance of this issue and sort out fact from fiction.

Senate Bill 1652 Smart Grid Legislation

Governor Quinn’s Veto Letter of SB1652

Policy makers need to get beyond rhetoric and begin to understand this issue and cut through the fog and politics on this vitally important issue. Let’s start thinking and acting as if we really care about the future and lead the revolution.    

you-tube video when it is ready