The DOE says a meeting of “40 business leaders from the electric utility, manufacturing, telecommunications and information technology industries” is set for Monday (May 18) morning in Washington. DOE Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will chair the meeting.
As I reported last month, the purpose of the meeting is to try to expedite the adoption of Smart Grid standards before federal monies start flowing into grid-related projects. Federal officials are making this a fairly high-profile meeting, so one assumption is that they are going to try to use public persuasion to strong-arm these business leaders into cooperating with each other.
Just a reminder, the Department of Commerce is tied in with this primarily because NIST is going to play a big role in developing the standards.