Galvin Electricity Initiative Executive Director Kurt Yeager sent an open letter to Department of Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, congratulating him on his cabinet nomination and calling for Chu to take immediate action addressing the unreliable, inefficient and insecure U.S. electricity grid.

While President-elect Barack Obama's electricity plans include modernizing the nation's grid infrastructure, Yeager disagrees with some grid modernization advocates who suggest that maintaining a centralized system under regulated monopoly control is the best approach. The Initiative and Yeager hold that the key to quickly creating a smarter grid is by creating local smart microgrids -- small, modernized versions of the electrical grid built by private sector entrepreneurs at the local level that incorporate clean, distributed and renewable resources and are capable of most efficiently balancing supply and demand at all times.

Besides providing consumers with higher quality, more reliable power for their homes and businesses, Yeager believes that smart microgrids offer significant benefits for the struggling U.S. economy as well.

"Locally controlled smart microgrids can jump-start local economies through new job creation and new business opportunities for entrepreneurs in an open, competitive electricity service market," said Yeager. "By creating this new electricity business model -- one in which entrepreneurs and their innovative technologies are, for the first time, invited to participate as partners -- entrepreneurial innovators will step in and produce major long-term savings for consumers, communities and utilities alike."

In order to build smart microgrids in local communities across the country, the Initiative and Yeager are calling for Chu to champion federal mandates creating national electricity policies, as was done in the 1950s with the Interstate Highway Act, that eliminate the regulatory conflicts at the federal and state levels impeding grid modernization and microgrid development. Such policy principles include compensating utilities for efficiency programs and customer service, not just for the amount of electricity they sell; requiring much higher reliability standards for the electric grid; enacting stricter energy efficiency building standards to conserve power; and changing tax codes and state regulations to foster grid innovation.