A Palo Alto, CA-based non-profit, private energy-related research firm last week rolled out a public-education campaign aimed at raising $100 billion over a 10-year period to upgrade major electric transmission and distribution facilities, and to introduce technological changes to bring the power network in touch with the 21st Century.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) announced the campaign along with a study it released last Monday, which cited the concerns over lagging investment in the aging power transmission infrastructure. “The investment gap…is exacting a significant reliability cost that is seen as just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the electricity infrastructure’s growing vulnerability to capacity, reliability, security and service challenges,” the 76-page report said. “This tendency to mortgage the future will, unless urgently corrected, inevitably impose a heavy price on the nation’s productivity and economy, and on the welfare of its citizens,” it cautioned.

The transmission system, as evidenced by the blackout in the Midwest, Northeast and eastern Canada on Aug. 14, should be viewed as the likely “first point of meltdown,” according to the EPRI report, “Electricity Sector Framework for the Future.”

“We need to get legislators, regulators, utilities, power equipment manufacturers [and others] working with us in a ‘concerted effort'” to help raise the investment funds and make necessary policy changes, Stephen Gehl, EPRI’s director of strategic technology, told NGI. “We’ve been working with utilities all along” since EPRI’s board of directors commissioned the study a year ago, Gehl said. The institute has more than 1,000 members, including U.S. and international utilities, independent power producers and policy makers.

At the end of the first year of the campaign, he projects EPRI and the power industry will have raised several hundred millions of dollars for grid improvements. This should be enough to have a “robust program.”

Gehl foresees the grid improvements being carried out in two phases — Phase One would involve routine maintenance and the addition of new transmission and distribution capacity; and Phase Two would incorporate technological improvements into the system. If there is widespread industry support, he projects that major upgrades to the transmission network could be carried out in about five years. But improvements to the distribution system will take longer because it is a “far more complex” system.

The EPRI estimates that a grid investment of $100 billion would add $100 to annual residential electricity bills. It noted, however, that each consumer would save approximately $500 a year in the cost of goods and services purchased as a result of the infrastructure improvements, which would bring a customer’s net savings to $400 a year.

Along with the physical upgrades, the EPRI study stressed the need for industry to make use of new technology to transform the delivery system. It cited five areas:

A successful transformation must be grounded in “four fundamental realities,” the study said. “Electricity is more than a form of commodity energy.” Rather, “it is the nation’s indispensable engine of prosperity and quality of life,” it noted, and it “is a service-based enterprise whose value to consumers depends on the world’s most technically complex and precise infrastructure.”

The opportunities for technology “lie principally in the ability to increase functionality and differentiate the service value of electricity,” and to make customers “active participants in and beneficiaries of the electricity enterprise, rather than remaining captive to the obsolete commodity model,” the report said.

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