This week, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District is set to take its first step toward what promises to be the most significant development in electricity in a century: the "smart" grid.

Thursday, the SMUD board is scheduled to approve a 30-month rollout of 620,000 meters for the Internet age. Instead of today's "dumb" odometer-style counters, the devices will be brainy hubs in a new electrical nervous system that promises to save money and power and foster the next tech boom.

"The electrical system right now looks a lot like it did when Westinghouse and Edison were alive," said Steve Hauser, a vice president at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "Once you get these systems in place, it's like the Internet in that it sets a foundation for an explosion of innovation."

The big change: Smart meters can talk.

At first, the discussion will stay mostly between the meter and SMUD. A home's power usage will be beamed straight to the utility, eliminating the meter-reader's monthly visit. If your power goes out, the meter will tell SMUD instantly (now, the utility usually learns of outages when customers call).

It won't be long, though, before you and your home have a chance to get in on the conversation, too. To start with, the smart meter can report how much power your home is using – first day-by-day, but eventually second-by-second – and how much it's costing you. The more information customers have, SMUD hopes, the more they'll take steps to cut their energy use.

Next-generation thermostats, appliances and even light fixtures will be able to send and receive signals from the utility via the meter. Ultimately – with customers' consent – SMUD may be able to order hundreds of thousands of air conditioners and other appliances to adjust their power demand to relieve strain on the grid. A dishwasher could postpone its cycle, for instance, or a refrigerator could raise its freezer temperature by a couple degrees for a few hours.

"It's not going to be that long after the infrastructure gets in place that devices are going to emerge" to take advantage of it, said Don Von Dollen, manager of the IntelliGrid program at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group funded by the electric utility industry.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s smart-meter program is already under way. The utility is finishing installations in Yolo County this summer and will start soon in El Dorado County. Roseville Electric may launch a similar program as soon as next summer.

The federal government committed $4.5 billion in the economic stimulus package passed by Congress in February to building the smart grid. SMUD, the state Department of General Services and California State University, Sacramento, are hoping to land a chunk of that funding. Together, they plan to apply for as much as $100 million to develop a regional smart-grid demonstration project.

Washington is funding huge demonstration projects in part because much about the smart grid is still conceptual. Government, utilities and industry are hammering out key details of how the technology will work, such as how smart meters and appliances will communicate. Protecting the system from hackers is another concern.

While new meters will be the first component of the smart grid most consumers see, changes will extend all the way back to the power plant. Both government and utilities are looking to the new technologies to manage a power system that soon will face dramatic changes in both supply and demand.

Renewable energy mandates and greenhouse-gas controls are likely to drive increases in clean but sporadic and scattered power sources, like wind and solar. Today's grid doesn't handle these well. For instance, utilities can't tell how much power California's tens of thousands of household solar installations are pumping into the grid at any given time.

The smart grid also should better handle the expected flood of plug-in hybrids and electric cars in the next decade. Power use already peaks in the afternoon, when people get home from work. Having to recharge a fleet of battery-powered cars at the same time stands to make the problem even worse.

Call The Bee's Jim Downing, (916) 321-1065.