When President Barack Obama talks about his priorities, energy always comes high on the list, and with good reason. The plunge in oil prices may have reduced their political salience, but securing energy supplies and averting the threat of climate change are as important as ever. An idea at the heart of his programme is the creation of a “smart grid”: an electricity network that uses information technology to manage flows of power. The cost of such a grid would be enormous, but it would be money well spent.

The smart grid has become today’s equivalent of the “information superhighway”: a piece of trendy high-tech jargon. Yet that fashionability should not be allowed to obscure its merits. One of its strongest supporters is Steven Chu, Mr Obama’s energy secretary, and no one could accuse him of being a dilettante. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he has been serving on the electricity transmission sub-committee of America’s Energy Future, a research group backed by the national academies of science and engineering.