Green Energy Reporter

The Obama White House rolled out a $3.4bn in smart grid funding today, impacting every state except Alaska.

There has been talk of a smart grid announcement by the White House for a few days now. The well-connected Washington journo Mike Allen at the Politico led yesterday, in his daily Playbook column, with news that President Obama would overnight in Miami to make a smart grid announcement the next day “that will be the largest stimulus investment so far in clean energy.”

The $3.4 billion smart grid funding is a confirmation for the smart grid sector, which all along knew that the money had been approved earlier this year as part of the administration’s signature stimulus law. Back in June the Department of Energy announced that it would disburse $3.9 billion in stimulus grants, about $500 million more than was announced today. We’ve called the DOE to find out more about this.

The funding also includes $4.7 billion in matched grants from the private sector. All in all, that’s $8 billion in public/private smart grid investments.

For a fun and insightful education on how the smart grid works, see this video.

Citing an analysis by the Electric Power Research Institute, the DOE estimates that the implementation of smart grid technologies could reduce electricity use in the country by more than 4 percent by 2030. In dollar terms, that translates in savings of $20.4 billion for businesses and consumers around the country.

Of the four hundred applications received by the DOE, some one hundred received awards. The smallest funding is a $397,000 grant to support a small North Carolina power utility, the Stanton County Public Power District and its extension of its smart meter network. The Baltimore Gas and Electric Company got one of the largest grants,  $200 million to deploy smart meters to its 1.1 million customers. For a complete list of funded smart grid projects,  see here and here.

As the New York Times‘ Green Inc. points out all states got smart grid funding but Alaska, so far, no explanations as to why.

Katherine Hamilton, president of the GridWise Alliance, a public-private partnership devoted to grid modernization, said:

These grants are an important down-payment on building a smarter grid and will certainly jump start both industry and state regulators to deploy smart grid technologies.

Today’s announcement is yet another indication of how vital Washington has become over the past year as a funding source. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin dubs the capital “the new Wall Street.”  He’s got a point.

But it’s not just the financial services industry that’s relocated on the shores of the Potomac. The country’s growing cleantech sector is also looking to D.C. for guidance and hard cash. Just yesterday, Energy Secretary Steven  Chu announced $157 million in early stage investments as part of its ARPA-E program. And today Vice President Joe Bidden is traveling to his home state of Delaware to highlight a plan to reopen a closed General Motors factory in Wilmington to produce plug-in hybrid cars.

Obama’s smart grid announcement follows his green pep talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday and comes as the administration is wrestling with a record-high unemployment rate and concern that the economic impact of the Obama administration’s $787-billion stimulus plan has peaked.