How Smartphones Could Revolutionize the Way We Heat and Cool Our Homes

While smart grid technology can reduce energy use and make it easier to integrate renewable energy like wind and solar into the grid, making our current distribution systems smarter won’t necessarily reduce carbon emissions and slow rising global temperatures. "The smart grid is only green if you make it green," says Colin Meehan, clean energy analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund’s Austin office.

A customer can always choose to turn up the air conditioning on a hot day. But by helping utilities to be more responsive and flexible, smart grid technology will improve their ability to manage electricity distribution during extreme weather—or, in other words, to cope with conditions that climate change is making more common. Rising global temperatures made the 2011 Texas heat wave and drought twenty times more likely than it would have been in the 1960s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A modern U.S. energy infrastructure will have to be prepared.