Rural electric cooperatives in 14 states will get a piece of $900 million in loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help the utilities upgrade, expand, maintain and replace rural America's electric infrastructure. The money comes from the USDA Rural Development's Rural Utilities Service. The bulk of the money will be used to build nearly 1,500 miles of line and improve more than 1,700 miles of existing line in rural areas, but $19 million will go to smart grid technologies.

"Investments in smart grid technologies will give rural electric utilities and their consumers one more tool to better manage use of electricity, increase reliability and lower costs," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in making the announcement.

States and co-ops that received money include Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. For a full list, click Read More.

We're in the midst of a heat wave and drought that are on record to be Texas' worst in recorded history. (and now imagine if global warming actually kicked in, the way all those scientists say! *wink*)

But we have a few options. Cope, adapt, or conquer. I much prefer the last solution to the first.

First, we can cope. Go find some shade or just go sit in our homes and offices and blast the air conditioning as much as we can to make these ever-warming, record-breaking hot, dry summers as tolerable as possible. But massive electric bills and rolling blackouts don't sound like much of an alternative.

Or, we can adapt. We can change how we do things to stave off the worst effects of our unprecedented droughts and heat waves. This means doing smart things, like moving to smart meters and energy efficiency. Our central Texas coops have been among the best at rolling out some of these programs

Adapting is fine, but even better is conquering our problems. As Texans, and as Americans, this is generally the tactic most of us would choose. This would mean not only going after the low-hanging efficiency fruit, and aggressively going after demand-side management as a resource, but also looking for ways to turn our crisis into opportunity. While the Texas sun may be causing us problems, it can also be the key to our future, as solar prices drop to rates competitive with other "cheap" fossil fuels.

You can read the rest of this over on the Texas site by clicking here.

Two Central Texas cooperatives are leading the way with a pilot program allowing hundreds of their members to view and control their energy use in real time. These new smart meters have already shown significant savings for co-op members using the smart meters. This begs the question- why aren't we all using smart meters?