Mr. O’Donnell made the point that building roads in the U.S. was a local phenomenon subject to a patchwork of regulations and constraints – until President Eisenhower broke down the barriers with the creation of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950’s. He further noted that high voltage DC technologies now readily available – such as those offered by ABB (NYSE: ABB) – could transmit large blocks of power across the whole continent with losses of only about 11% (excluding the conversion facilities at each terminal).

We in the cleantech community haven’t talked much about it, instead focusing on the sexy/cool generation/storage/consumption technologies, but maybe it’s time to ratchet the discussion about the so-called “smart grid” up to another level.