Our nation’s electricity infrastructure will be upgraded into an efficient, secure, reliable, adaptable machine! But the slow smart grid evolution will be achieved with smaller steps. What does short term smart grid future look like? Read on for current smart grid trends.
As a time-limited $19.5 billion market opportunity, meter and communications suppliers with be working with utilities around the world on replacing typical home and business electric meters with Smart Meters. Be prepared for empowered decision making around your business’s energy usage and energy costs.
This is an article devoted to the idea that a revolution in software design is needed in order to produce software –or as insiders often refer to it: the code – that is both greener itself and that is designed to help other systems and products become greener… i.e. more energy and resource efficient, less wasteful, more adaptive to current conditions.
There are two often intertwined paths to follow, both of which are important for this discussion. Code itself needs to become greener; using virtual resources more efficiently and thus using fewer hardware resources and less power to accomplish the same computing tasks. Code should also be designed with a feature set that enables other products, running the code, to use less energy and to be able to time shift their energy requirements to off peak periods.
In a sign that the Smart Grid is beginning to gain critical traction and momentum in the wider economy Whirlpool, the world’s leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances has announced that it plans to have all of its electronically controlled appliances be Smart Grid compatible by 2015.
Smart meters, which are meters that are hooked up to a network so that they can deliver information about current usage in a timely manner, are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Smart meters will enable real time energy decisions in response to current conditions. They form a critical cornerstone of the smart grid; in fact in many ways they are the “smart” in the smart grid. This opens up a whole slew of new opportunities for smart software developers and smart entrepreneurs [no pun intended] to build the software applications and services to support and to add value to these new smart networked grids. What kinds of software opportunities exist in this newly opening sector?
