Smart Thinking | Nature

Nature editorial:

This week, the US Senate began to craft a massive energy bill ... Lawmakers working on the new bill should pay close attention to countries such as Denmark and Germany, where the transition to energy systems based on renewable sources and small-scale generation is already far advanced.

In the United States, responsibility for forging a consensus on how the components of the smart grid will talk to each other falls to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which received $10 million for the task in the stimulus bill. NIST should move quickly. Every day that a coal-powered facility can’t work out how to sell its excess heat back to the grid means more fossil-fuel energy is wasted.