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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (545295)	1/21/2010 5:56:00 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573850

I'm assuming for now that was a serious question. Here goes then. Think of the way the Internet operates today. The benefit is that it is a distributed system, which allows for many different individual parts to contribute to the whole. This is possible because the Internet is a two-way system. Actually, it's a many to many system. Now think of our grid. It's a one way system with monopolies controlling what we get and when we get it and our government imposing pricing restrictions. Imagine a different grid that starts off being two-way and evolves to many to many, so that not only can I produce my own energy, but I can either sell it back to my utility at market rates or I can sell it to the highest bidder, which could be my neighbor, all in a seamless way, with transactions happening in real time and market prices without government market price controls. That's the smart grid and it is the very definition of a free market. I'd like to get us there. In fact, many entrepreneurs, the utility companies, and even the Dems and this Obama Administration want to get us there. The only obstacles are people in the GOP and people like Brumar who have a failure of the imagination. But here's the kicker, we need government involvement, if for no other reason, then to unwind the regulations that they have instituted and to provide incentives for utilities to transform into this new free market model. If I were in charge, I'd say I'll lift price controls for utilities that move to a frictionless energy trading market backed by new infrastructure they build to allow for many to many trading between utilities and consumers. So you make it a choice, stay with old tech and live with price controls or move to new tech and get the benefit of a free market. You see? What the government hath wrought, the government must unwind. It's a win-win-win.