NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

The 'Grid' is pretty simple really: think National Grid, as in electricity. Electrical appliances come all set up for the right voltages and specifications, all of which are governed by regulation and the law. We use the electricity and we get sent a bill. Mostly we're not really bothered about where the electricity comes from, nor that there is an international business in generating capacity and electricity brokering. To us it's just another utility. It would be a bit ridiculous to own your own power station unless you're really keen for some reason.

The Grid idea evolves around building a similar infrastructure for distributed computing. Think of a utility company delivering all the computing, networking, and data storage resources you could ever need, just like your electricity. Interesting thought?