Narrator: This is Science Today. Smart grid refers to a host of technologies that are collectively intended to modernize the way electricity is delivered and utilized. Joe Eto, an electricity reliability scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says smart grid technology involves a number of innovations that make smart phones a possibility, including sensing, communications and computation.

Eto:     And embedding them in the electricity delivery system should improve its economic efficiency, reliability and security.  A good example is ways in which the future we'll be able to interact with the grid in the way that we use our appliances, our buildings, and ultimately our transportation systems, ways in which the electric grid may be able to tell us what the true cost of electricity is at a given time of day and enables to make more efficient choices about how we use electricity or give us a heads up or warning that there's a problem emerging...it gives us the opportunity to modify our electricity use in ways that we can use to avoid blackouts.

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.