Smart Grids 101: Connectivity of the Future
The Obama administration has included $3.5 billion in grid modernization in its budget for the 2016 fiscal year. On top of that, the smart grid IT market is expected to double by 2024 and the future for implementation of smart grid technology is all but certain, with cities like Austin, Chicago and Sacramento leading the way.
Here’s a bit more about smart grids and how they could improve life as we know it:
Smart Technologies – A Brief History
The formal move toward an intelligent grid started in 2002, when the Electric Power Research Institute proposed a research project called IntelliGrid. Eighteen months later, IntelliGrid Architecture was born and the first smart grid architecture was available for power distribution.
The focus of the new architecture was on the following four areas:
Home Area Networks (HAN)
Network-side applications, including reactive power control
“The future is now” utility functions such as solar photovoltaic power generation
Integration of Demand Response that analyzes customer usage
Unsurprisingly, the effort to move to smart grid systems has since become joined at the hip with the Internet. During the September 2014 APEC Energy Ministerial Meeting, Chairman Liu Zhenya from the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) called on his peers to produce something called the Internet of Energy (IoE).
