Southern California Edison (SCE) has just announced that the company will be designing and installing the country’s most advanced neighborhood electricity circuit. This project has been dubbed “Circuit of the Future” and has started to deliver power to approximately 1,400 residential and business customers who are currently residing in Southern California’s Inland Empire, a place known to be the nation’s fastest growing urban region. According to John E. Bryson, chairman and chief executive officer of Edison International, “A high-tech world can no longer afford a low-tech electricity grid. With smart grid technology, power outages will be fewer and shorter. Because advanced digital technology can react more quickly than human operators, potential problems can be identified, analyzed and isolated before they become significant power outages.”

The Circuit of the Future works pretty much like a standard household electrical circuit, featuring individual segments of larger power grids which can be controlled with on-off switches that are protected by circuit breakers. These will be able to carry power from neighborhood substations to homes and businesses. SCE itself boasts a 50,000-square-mile power delivery network that has been subdivided into 4,200 such circuits, where every individual circuit connects and delivers power to roughly 1,500 residential and business customers.

U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Kevin Kolevar, “Projects such as Southern California Edison’s Circuit of the Future will enhance the reliability and security of our nation’s electric systems. Demonstrating how advanced technologies will perform under real-world grid conditions is an important next step toward achieving President Bush’s goal of accelerating the penetration of advanced technologies to modernize our electric infrastructure. I applaud SCE for its vision and leadership in this effort.” All this in the name of progress. To date, SCE engineers have already built give advanced technologies into the Circuit of the Future, so here’s to fewer outages and faster service restoration. Geeks would definitely hope this could roll out nationwide soonest possible so that they can continue their gaming or surfing sessions uninterrupted.

Press Release