In the Hottest Part of the Summer, When I was a Kid, I'd sit at the end of the driveway with a stick and pop tar bubbles as they oozed out from the asphalt. And whenever a dump truck, a backhoe or a line truck came by, you can bet I'd track down their destination and watch until the workers had patched up whatever needed fixing.

So going to work for the power industry was a natural fit for me. Early on, I spent a week or two in a power plant making sure the coal being transported to the pulverizers didn't jam on the conveyor belts. Talk about a dirty job. But I didn't mind one bit.

Then I worked in distribution, double-clutching one of those old stick-shift line trucks, dragging a pole trailer behind me. Talk about a wide-turning angle. I grunted for some pretty rough linemen and even did a little line work myself.

The pace of life has definitely picked up since the days my brother and I hung around the house, digging holes, whittling sticks or throwing crab apples.

Today we zip by in a flutter, first one way, then the other, accomplishing little but moving with great velocity. I admit I'm not the fastest kid on the block. And when pushed, I tend to take a step back and see whether I am being pushed in the right direction. Then, only after thoughts sift through the labyrinth of my brain, do I get a sense of what needs to be accomplished and how. Then I'll get moving again and usually in a productive vein.

I'd prefer to state otherwise, but many of our executives put their motors in gear before they engage their brains. So they get to use their reverse gears a lot. We are facing a lot of big issues in our industry that we need to get our arms around. Otherwise, we will lurch off at an odd angle and spend a bunch of money foolishly that we can't get back.

Here are some pondering points.

• How wise does our power grid need to be?

  I'm afraid if we move too soon or at too fast a pace we will turn the “intelligent grid” movement into the latest fad, only to see it fade right before our eyes. Instead, let's make sure our intelligent grid strategy fits within our corporate objectives.

  And will other advances make our efforts obsolete? I received a press release recently announcing that communications companies intend to provide Internet energy portals that could impact the value proposition for utilities installing two-way metering. We will see if that proves to be a viable option.

  If we spend all our dollars making our power-delivery systems wise, will we have money left to construct lines and hang insulators? A comment I heard years back keeps running through my mind. I was visiting a manufacturing facility in Berlin, talking with a plant manager who said, “We can cover our transformers and breakers in sensors and instrumentation, but the devices themselves have 30-year lives. If we aren't careful, we will spend a lot of our maintenance money diagnosing and repairing faulty sensors.”

  Let's make sure we monitor only what makes sense to monitor and then build a condition history we can use to make informed maintenance decisions.

• Why do we need more wind and solar unless we have the ability to store it?

The ability to transport wind energy is not sufficient. We already know that depending on the resource, we can actually accept wind or solar energy into the grid on the order of 15% to 40% of the time. Cycling our fossil and nuclear plants doesn't make sense, so we need to put on our collective thinking caps and figure out how much green electricity we need to store and where we ought to store it. We have some good options. We can store virtual electricity to meet our summer peaks with ice cooling. We can store real electricity in batteries (whether stationary or moving). We can store bulk electricity in pumped storage and underground compressed-air facilities. I expect there are quite a number of good storage options out there. Let's find them and put them into play so we can consume all the green we are now installing.

IS THE TAR HOT?

Sometimes the best action is to wait until the time is right. Like in my childhood days when I learned you can't pop a tar bubble until the sun has heated the road sufficiently to vaporize the moisture in the asphalt. Sometimes we just have to be patient until the time is right.

Because of our deteriorating economy, government officials in most countries are stepping in to create infrastructure jobs. Let's tap into the funds to build out our overloaded power grids and build intelligence into our delivery and metering systems, but at a measured pace. We can't — nor should we try — to do everything at once.

We have an opportunity to refurbish our grids to meet load growth for decades to come. But let's move forward when our vision is clear and the asphalt is hot. Then our investment decisions will be money in the bank. Okay, so maybe that is a bad analogy with today's financial crisis. But you get the point.