With the continuous increase of energy demand and environment issues, the development of a smart electric power grid has become a critical research topic world widely. The driving forces toward lower-carbon generation technologies, improved efficiency on the power delivery, and increased user-supplier interaction, have presented ever greater challenges to the energy and power grid research and development. To tackle such challenges, it requires innovative research development from many different disciplines, including but are not limited to, power engineering, complex systems, security, computational intelligence, social network, mathematical research, and many others.

There are many efforts on smart grid have been addressed recently at different levels ranging from academic research, industrial development, and government policy makers. For instance, the U.S. DOE has established a Federal Smart Grid Task Force under Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 to coordinate the activities in the nationwide Grid 2030 program, which calls for the construction of a smart grid to enhance reliability, efficiency, and security, as well as contribute to the climate change strategic goal of reducing the carbon footprint. In a similar way, the European Technology Platform (ETP) SmartGrids program was initiated in 2005 to create a joint vision for the European networks of 2020 and beyond. Most recently, the IEEE also launched the Smart Grid Initiative to coordinate such multidisciplinary global efforts towards the long-term energy objective.

As computational intelligence (CI) research aims to understand, advance, and develop nature-inspired methodologies to address the critical research issues in science and engineering, it is widely recognized that CI techniques could play a critical technical innovation to the development of smart grid. Therefore, we organize this Smart Grid Task Force within the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) to address the critical research and development of smart grid.