There is good reason to do both. We need to be able to move electricity between renewable production zones. As I've argued in past posts, even if we get all rooftop power, you still need to move electricity between places with different daily and different seasonal production patters. (Also, even if we get rooftop solar, most wind potential is concentrated in a few areas. And if you do solar, you want complementary wind.)

But we need fine grained grid control and demand side management too. And a smart grid and national transmission complement one another.  If you are doing demand side management being able to combine demand from differnt time zones and climates smoothes it out. If you are putting variable power into the grid the from distance places being able to delay some demand to match supply is a huge benefit. We need full smart grid, and full national transmission. Not one or the other, but both.

This is a good place to start the discussion.

The lakes or ponds would be storage, distributed over the entire system.  And the larger national super grid could be smart too and have larger storage, resevoirs maybe?

The national super grid should be a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) system, owned by the federal government, just like the federal highway system.  It should be buried along rail corridors and freeway medians.  

That's the beauty of HVDC, it has very low losses (0.5% per 100 miles) and when it is buried even eliminates the static corona effect, that can produce leakage and electronic interference.

By burying this super grid along rail lines and freeways, rail lines and future high speed commuter rail in freeway median space can be electrified.  The other big problems with long distance transmission are right-of-way and NIMBY lawsuits, this eliminates those big obstacles.

Local and regional grids would interconnect alternately feeding power into the super grid or drawing power out.  The super grid would act as a sort of national battery.  And with huge resevoirs connected directly to the super grid, like Superconducting Electromagnetic Energy Storage, large capacitive storage, pumped hydro, and/or solar furnace thermal cogeneration storage, the super grid can become an actual national battery.

Distributed generation and storage, controlled by smart grid devices can make local and regional grids act like batteries for the super grid too.

What about surplus power, generated when both wind and sun are peaking?  It can be used to desalinate sea water and recycle waste water, locking the value of the energy into that valuable commodity.

Should the smart grid follow the model of distributed computing, with each home, building, factory, and energy source interacting with all the others, just like a school of fish or a flight of geese interacts to make up a sort of hive mind that constantly adjusts to change?

I think so, and I'm betting that Google and others are already working on this sort of model.  Billing, subsidy distribution, and weather prediction of solar, wind, and temperature paterns flowing across the grid areas would all be handled by the distributed computing smart grid network.  

Your home smart grid computer would decide how much power to send/receive from the grid and when to store power in your home (as heat/cold in building mass and appliances and plugin hybrid or emergency backup batteries), based on information from the grid as a whole.  This would make local weather prediction based on wind and cloud and air pressure patterns respond in real time to information from every other home up the wind stream.

This whole topic needs a new thread every week or so to cover new developments, technological, political, and financial.  Fascinating!  Then we are going to get actual results soon, from the boulder smart grid city project and many others around the globe.  

The IBM smart grid leader said recently that they are working on 50 projects already worldwide.

The investment opportunities in the companies participating in smart grid technology, applied to local, regional, and the national super grids will rival those of the internet boom and last a lot longer this time.  Giving all of us small investors another chance to beat the big boys.

Spot the Ciscos and Dells and Microsofts of this boom early on and ride the green energy wave!  Surf's (almost) up!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Let's go whole hog Republican and invest Social Security in the super grid stock market.

Bah!
One reason mentioned was that electricity has to be routed not to where it's needed but to where the most money can be made.  That needs to be fixed before any of the rest of this cooperative world can be implemented.

Yes, "cooperative:" we're back to the era when fire departments all had different sized water connections and different financial arrangements and so would stand and watch your property burn.

If one part of the grid can with hold power from or charge monopoly prices to another, there is a real problem.

Where have all the horses gone?

There's another very important reason why the push for major new transmission is problematic: there's absolutely no guarantee that the new or expanded power lines will be used for renewable energy.  The regions that most want increased transmission are the biggest coal producers in the country.  Utilities are already talking up the need for "load following" (i.e. fossil fuel) generation to "back up" renewables on these new power lines.  Never mind that there are other ways to do this.  The coal industry never sleeps, and it's very much present in the transmission development process. The map that shows all that big wind coming out of the Dakotas?  Well, the wind power doesn't exist.  What you'll actually find are the dirtiest coal plants in the country and a lot of people working on building more.