![]() ![]() In fact, during all of our lifetimes the United States has successfully navigated very similar terrain before. Remaking our energy infrastructure is an enormous challenge, but I firmly believe that it is an achievable one. The smart grid, clearly, rests at the heart of that effort. To be successful in that effort, the United States must deploy technology, deploy it rapidly, and invest in innovation to make that technology better and more powerful. Fundamentally, our clean energy future rests on our ability to redesign, re-engineer, and rebuild the infrastructure that powers our economy today. But in reality-and what’s so critical to our conversation here today-the challenge of moving to a clean energy economy is a physical one. In Washington, we are used to thinking about clean energy in policy terms: as a means for avoiding global warming, and providing greater energy security. Not the nuts and bolts challenge of technically building smarter distribution networks, which has been very well covered here, but the larger design challenge of how we approach the grid itself.Īt this moment, the world is at a turning point-we can transition to cleaner sources of energy, and our children and grandchildren can reap all the benefits that accompany that transition or we can continue to rely on 20th century technologies and 19th century fuels, and speed the creation of a world with an unpredictably altered climate, dwindling or difficult-to-reach energy resources, and exacerbated geopolitical instability. To start, I’d like to take a moment to lay out the scope of the challenge and opportunity before us. What I would like to do with my time here is to take a step back and look at the clean energy challenge more broadly, and how the smart grid fits into that picture-and map out the next steps of a new policy framework for building the next-generation infrastructure that is so needed today. And for the most part, I will leave those particular challenges to the many engineers and investors in the room. I know that over the past several days, you have dug pretty deep into what those strategies look like, and spent a great deal of time and brain power breaking down the technical challenges ahead. It’s heartening to have so many representatives from industry, from government, from academia, and from all over the world in the room today to share their vision for that transformation and real strategies for achieving it. But suffice it to say that I have tremendous admiration for the work Secretary Chu and the department are doing, and GridWise is truly an invaluable forum for sharing ideas for transforming the world’s energy infrastructure. I thought about making a crack at Rick Perry’s expense about remembering to include DOE in my acknowledgements. Department of Energy for organizing this event. ![]() A special thank you to Bob Shapard for inviting me to speak here today, and to the GridWise Alliance and the U.S. The following remarks were given by John Podesta at the Gridwise Global Forum on Novemin Washington, D.C. ![]()
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