If inventor Thomas A. Edison came back to life today, he might be amazed by such

inventions as the cell phone and the Internet.

"But," one of New York's premier experts on electric power noted Wednesday, "if Thomas

Edison were to come back to Earth today, he not only could recognize the power grid, he

probably could repair it."

And that, said Robert B. Catell, chairman of the New York Smart Grid Consortium, is the

problem.

A system so crucial to nearly every aspect of modern life has advanced very little in more

than a century, when Edison was one of its creators and Western New York was the location of

the first power grid, connecting the hydroelectric plant in Niagara Falls with the street

trolley system in Buffalo.

What New York and the nation are now struggling with, Catell said, is a power delivery

network that is expensive, inefficient, vulnerable to failure or sabotage and unable to bring

the benefits of new sustainable and nonpolluting energy sources to the homes, businesses and

public buildings that need them.

The answer to that is the so-far theoretical idea of a smart grid — decentralized,

computer-controlled, interactive, two-way system of power distribution that will take full

advantage of clean power sources and information technology. It was the subject of discussion

Wednesday as academics, engineers, power company executives and attorneys gathered for the

latest seminar in the University at Buffalo-sponsored series called "The Business of Energy"

in the Buffalo Niagara Marriott, Amherst.

"It will be one of the greatest engineering and technological innovations of our time,"

said Catell, who is a former chairman of National Grid and currently chairman of the Advanced

Energy Research and Technological Center at the State University at Stony Brook.

Without a smart grid, Catell said, the nation will not be able to take full advantage of

nonpolluting, renewable power sources, such as wind and solar, and will never be able to

provide enough outlets to plug in the coming generation of all-electric autos.

The idea, he said, is not to enmesh the nation in a new network of electric wires, but to

make the wires we have more efficient and to oversee them in a way that power can be shifted

from areas of surplus to areas of need, around bottlenecks, preventing outages before they

happen.

"It will be a formidable economic opportunity," Catell said.

Formidable, echoed William J. Miller, president of Maximum Control Technologies, because of

the many problems that must be solved, technologies that must be invented or improved,

regulations that must be updated and decisions to be made. Even with millions in federal

stimulus dollars already handed out, he said, the puzzle is going to be hard to piece

together.

"Everything is on the table right now," Miller said. "The people involved in this are being

told by the president, "Make this happen. We got you the money.' But it's still pretty

complicated."

And an opportunity, said Nathan Rizzo, vice president of solar power company Solar Liberty,

because of the jobs to be created and money to be made from smart grid technology and new

energy sources.

One area of promise is that household solar power and/or wind power systems can, at least

part of the time, produce more juice than a home can use. With a two-way electric meter

installed, Rizzo said, a homeowner can cut his energy costs twice — once by buying less,

twice by selling his surplus back to the power utility.

That two-way connection to the power grid will also create some new issues, said attorney

(and former electrical engineer) Thomas E. Popek of Hodgson Russ LLP, one of the event's

sponsors.

The two-way metering and monitoring technology necessary to make the smart grid smart

enough to manage power use will have the capacity to collect a lot of personal data on

individual households, he said.

That data could include the distinct "energy signatures" of everything from inefficient

washing machines to life-support devices, providing strangers a window on such information as

the products the family might want to buy or the times when the home is likely to be empty.

Popek said that consumers will have to be made aware of those aspects of the new generation

of power supplies and that there will have to be rules for how such data can be collected,

stored and shared.