Description of an analytic framework for characterizing and estimating potential benefits from GridWise™, a national initiative to link electricity suppliers and end-users via high-speed networks that provide real-time information about system capacities, demand, prices, and status. Preliminary results indicate that the gross benefits can be quite large. However, the variance among estimates is also large, so delineating a range of benefits based on plausible input variables is concluded to be more useful at this time than trying to converge on a single “best estimate.”