The National Academy of Engineering lists the 20 Greatest Engineering Acheivements of the 20th Century - right at the top? You guessed it, electrification. But lest we be tempted to rest on our laurels, we have change afoot, and there's certainly more work to be done - here in the US, we are utterly dependent on this energy ecosystem we have created, but look at what we have created! The complexity astounds the casual observer, and going deeper in, its easy to get lost in the arcane discussions of regulatory policy and stakeholder equity. Sure the grid is incredibly reliable, but certainly there is ample room for far more efficiency. Consider just the regulatory framework overseeing this engineering marvel. We'll start there.

At the federal level, we have the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Federal Communications Commision (FCC), the National Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) - I'll stop here, but I could go on ... and I haven't even mentioned the US Congress and the courts.

To ensure reliable operations on this grid that operates by keeping generation and load in balance, we have regional transmission organizations (RTOs) sometimes also called independent system operators (ISOs), as depicted in the map above. Here in Texas we have the amazing disconnected ISO island called ERCOT.

Moving down to the state level, state regulatory commissions and legislatures and governors oversee investor-owned utilities (IOUs), Transmission and Distribution utilities and retail electric providers. City councils and boards oversee our municipallly-owned utilities (MOUs) and member-owned cooperatives have their boards of directors.

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), there are 210 investor-owned electric utilities that account for 67 percent of revenue, 2,009 publicly-owned electric utilities (13% of revenue), and 883 cooperatives (10% of revenue). The Federal government is also in the power game, with nine electric utilities managed by the Army Corps of Engineers; the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Reclamation in the Department of the Interior, the International Boundary and Water Commission in the Department of State, the Power Marketing Administrations in the Department of Energy (Bonneville, Southeastern, Southwestern, and Western), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

We didn't design the electric system to be this complex, but it certainly turned out complex. Understanding how the system works requires more than a little knowledge about power engineering, telecommunications, business and economics, government and politics. I guess the system works - its hard to argue with success. But with the advent of technology changes embodied in the smart grid, and the prospect of a constrained world economy for the foreseeable future, we have an obligation to update this system to bring about more simplicity and bring more efficiency into the picture - this can't be the finished state of our electric system, can it?

Watch this space for more on this subject, I'm just getting wound up.