It was surprising, and pleasing, to see an ad for the smart grid during yesterday's Super Bowl. 

In case you missed it, the ad was one of two (or more; maybe I missed it) by GE's ecomagination brand. It gave a gig to Oz's scarecrow, singing an adaptation of "If I Only Had a Brain," only the "only if" applied not to the singer but to the grid itself.

As I wrote for E Magazine, the system that delivers electricity to our outlets is at once impressive and reliable, and old and dumb.

It's dumb because it's entirely a one-way river: The utility makes all these electrons and sends them downstream, but won't know that the power is out at your house until someone calls and tells them. Tom Friedman calls what has to has as the marriage of IT and ET, and it has also been called the "energy internet."

Letting information flow both ways will be momentous for energy use; this is easily in the top three BIG changes coming in the next couple of decades. So far, the particulars are being worked out in laboratories and in large-scale tests (50,000 homes and business customers in Boulder, Colo., for example), but wide implementation is not far off.

One sure sign of that is that GE paid a boatload of money to tout the idea during the most visible television time of the year.