The U.S. (California in particular) is a leader in installing a smart grid, so vital to getting the most out of charging electric vehicles in a cheap and more green way. California may be leading, but they are certainly not running alone. There's Boulder, for one. And we covered the UK's pricey discussion earlier this month. Now Michael Setters, the director of Smart Electric News, puts the broader European efforts into perspective.

Saying there are a "host of initiatives across Europe" focusing on one day installing smart grids, Setters' article announces that "dramatic change is coming" to the European grid. He describes how the EDP is working on InovGrid, a project that combines the communication abilities of a smart grid with micro-generation, and how Iberdrole is busy with "a new open, public and non-proprietary telecom architecture to support not only smart metering functionality but also to progress towards the electricity networks of the future." Now, that's a good idea.

There are also initiatives coming in Ireland and from companies ZigBee, Pepco, Gazprom, Siemens and eMeter about the smart grid in Europe. Someone's going to have to spend time and money on this, as the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that over $16 trillion (U.S.) will be spent around the world between 2003 and 2030 on designing, building and installing smart grids.

[Source: RenewableEnergyWorld]

Break out the celebratory bubbly! GridPoint and Duke Energy have a milestone to celebrate and it has nothing to do with basketball.

Using the GridPoint SmartGrid Platform, Duke Energy engineers successfully charged a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) in a residential garage during off-peak hours. The car was connected in the afternoon but the charging didn't begin until the 10 p.m. that evening and it finished before the demand for electricity rose in the morning. If it had of been your PHEV, it would have been all ready to take you to work with energy completely derived from off-peak excess capacity. The SmartGrid Platform took care of everything for you whilst you were hypothetically sleeping.

GridPoint is pioneering how the grid will be organized and used. Their SmartGrid Platform creates an intelligent network that integrates load measurement and control with energy storage and production. The platform will be able to handle all the innovation in renewable energy creation and storage (PHEVs) technologies as they make their way into our everyday lives. You can check out their vision for the future in this whitepaper (PDF) and surf through the website for answers to any of your questions. You can find more details in the press release after the jump.

While smart meters will provide a lot of benefits to pretty much everyone who uses electricity - whether they charge an electric car at night or not - the cost of swapping out everyone's current meter with one that communicates with the grid won't be cheap. In the U.S., California is taking the lead on installing smart meters. Over in the UK, energy companies and the government are taking a look at the potential installation costs and have found that this won't be a cheap process.

While the energy companies have said they expect it to cost £5bn, the Guardian is reporting that government estimates place the number closer to somewhere between £10bn and £20bn. Yikes (I'm not sure exactly how much that is in U.S. dollars, thanks to the billion/trillion issue, but it's a lot). Who will get to pay this cost? Why, the customers, of course. The installation will likely start in 2010 and be finished by 2020.

[Source: Guardian via Smart Electric Newsletter]

A while back we told you Excel energy was to conduct a study with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and others to asses what would happen if, using vehicle to grid (V2G) technology, you plugged thousands of PHEVs and different energy sources, such as solar and wind, into the grid and made them work together. They must have been happy with the results because today it was announced that they, along with a whole consortium of partners, are ready to begin the implementation phase. America will soon receive its first Smart Grid City: Boulder, Colorado is the guinea pig.

Why Boulder? Well, not only is it home to the University of Colorado but also the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is already involved in the project, and several other federal agencies, according to the news release on the Xcel Energy web site. Residents of the city should notice some improvements to their local grid over the next few years including, "transformation of existing metering infrastructure to a robust, dynamic electric system communications network, providing real-time, high-speed, two-way communication throughout the distribution grid" and "integration of infrastructure to support easily dispatched distributed generation technologies (such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles with vehicle-to-grid technology; battery systems; wind turbines; and solar panels)" among others.

To read the press release for yourself, make the jump.

Studies have been performed that indicate that there is enough excess electricity already being produced to charge a nation of electric cars. One hitch to that plan, though, is that it requires people to charge their vehicles while they sleep, during "off-peak" hours. For this reason, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran some numbers and found that the worst-case daytime charging scenario could require up to 160 new power plants to be erected nationwide. Their projected best-case scenario includes people only charging their cars after 10:00 pm and may not require any new power plants at all. That's a huge spread, of course, and we'd expect to see reality set in somewhere in between those two extremes. Of course, it would be great to see a large number of people choose to purchase renewable power, either from their utility or using solar cells or wind generators of their own. It is impossible at this point to know how consumers will react to electric cars being available on the market, but now is the time to start planning, so we're happy to see reports like this one being conducted.

[Source: ORNL via Science Daily]

Plug-in electric vehicles obviously aren't very common right now but if they do become widespread the stability of the electrical grid could become a major issue. Although analysts expect most EVs to be plugged in at night when electrical demand is typically lower, it's inevitable that we will see daytime plug-ins as well, particularly for drivers who have longer commutes and access to a socket at work. The Michigan Public Service Commission that oversees and regulates utilities in the state is kicking off a pilot program to study the integration of plug-in vehicles with the grid.

The investigations will look at what is necessary to implement intelligent grid technology so that deployment of plug-ins will actually help stabilize rather the stress the grid. Working with electricity suppliers, the commission will study the environmental impact of electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid (VTG) technology and how it will affect power generators and the grid. Commission staff will produce annual reports beginning in June 2009.

[Source: Michigan Public Service Commission]

Long-term, the automotive propulsion future belongs to either pure electric cars or hydrogen-powered vehicles. On this, most of us can agree. How and when and all sorts of other nit-picky details will take about as long to work as it does for Apple to release this dang SDK for the iPhone. One important step along the way will be the rollout of a smart grid, an enhanced version of the current power grid where our houses and cars can talk to the grid in various ways.

If you're interested in smart grid news, then you might want to sign up for the free Smart Electric News, a new newsletter focused on smart grid tech in Europe and the U.S. I got an invitation email this morning, and the website makes it look like anyone can sign up now to receive the first issue of the smart grid newsletter sometime soon. Check out the welcome email after the break.