The Sunshine State's Getting Smart

From its early alliance with American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP  ) to last fall's gang-up with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) , General Electric (NYSE: GE  ) has been pursuing smart grid opportunities for years now. At last, it seems this bright idea's time in the spotlight has arrived.

In partnership with FPL Group (NYSE: FPL  ) , Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO  ) , and white-hot start-up Silver Spring Networks (which counts Google as an investor), GE is preparing a million-meter march for Miami. If federal funds are forthcoming, the new project will expand a 100,000-meter initiative, kicked off by Florida Power & Light and Silver Spring in 2007, to every home in Miami-Dade County within two years. The group hopes Uncle Sam the Stimulus Man will pick up about half of the project's $200 million tab.

After divvying up the pie a few ways, this may sound like small potatoes for a company of GE's girth. Still, the conglomerate recently pegged the revenue potential of each million-person implementation at $500 million, so there are clearly dollars to be gathered beyond the initial implementation. For instance, there's got to be some sweet recurring service revenue on all those meters.

With this initiative, Florida Power & Light has proved itself a very forward-looking utility. Its subsidiary, NextEra Energy Resources, is already the largest generator of wind and solar power in North America. Now, with a technology-enabled grid feeding FPL better information about real-time consumption patterns, the utility will be better able to match those non-baseload power supplies to consumer demand, and perhaps even bring down the price for renewable power generated by its SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA  ) (Nasdaq: SPWRB  ) -powered plants in the process.