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Japanese pop culture fanatics know that the correct English pronunciation of Godzilla is Gojira (go-jeer-a), because it’s a play on a particular combination: the Japanese version of the English word for gorilla (gorira) and the actual Japanese term for whale (kujira).

Within our industry, we’ve been talking about a smarter grid for just about as long as any of us can remember—long before anyone coined the term smart grid. We’ve been developing solutions and installing them here and there all over the world, making slow and steady progress. But things are about to change fast.

The nation’s smart grid is taking shape, and the world is watching. With a critical, $4.5 billion jump start in 2009 stimulus funding from the federal government for demonstration projects, the United States’ smart grid is gathering form. The concept has been discussed for years, but today leaders from across communications, information technology (IT) and energy have joined to capitalize on the momentum to make the electric utility infrastructure more reliable, more flexible, more efficient … in a word, smarter.

The idea of providing electric customers with dynamic pricing information as a way of reducing peak demand is gaining traction as utilities begin looking for new ways to become more reliable and efficient.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is serious about the smart grid. It hired Nick Sinai, a former venture capitalist, to fill the new energy and environment director position.

In February 2009, the California Energy Commission (CEC) issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to “define the pathway to the California smart grid of 2020.” As stated in the RFP, among the challenges that California electric utilities will face are systems interoperability, communications and common information model standards, implementation schedules, well-defined interfaces and adapters to legacy systems. To a systems integrator, this sounds like the startup checklist to any project. To an electric utility, it’s a whole new ballgame.

Commonly called STATCOMs, static synchronous compensators were introduced in the 1990s as a way to help electric arc furnaces and steel processing facilities mitigate voltage flicker and other power quality problems.

Carbon taxes or caps, higher oil and natural gas prices, worries over oil availability and increased fuel switching are increasing the penetration of renewable generation resources into our transmission and distribution networks.