Smart grids, soft grids and some numbers to make you sit up
Written by: Previous staff on 18 August, 2009Although this time of the year is known as the silly season there is clearly some smart thinking going on.
I came across this article published yesterday about ‘Smart Grid 2.0: ‘The Soft Grid’. The ‘Soft Grid’ referred to here is an emerging market segment described as the ‘countless new applications needed to improve the generation, distribution, consumption and monitoring of the Grid’. (Contrast the ‘smart grid’, which, generally speaking, refers to infrastructure hardware.) The potential of this ‘intelligent software’ is noted and comparison to Apple’s approach to the third-party development of applications for its products is made.
The article also notes just how in vogue smart grids are, the increasing overlaps between the worlds of utilities and IT software and the beginnings of a transition of management professionals from the IT software and other tech-related fields into the smart grid sector.
The article is based on concepts explained in considerably more detail (some 145 pages) in this report. The report sets out to provide clarification about what the ‘smart grid’ is and where it is going; its findings make for very interesting reading. For example, did you know that:
- roughly $1.3 billion in venture capital was invested in the Smart Grid sector between 2005 and 2009 (through June 2009). Just over $105 million of that total went into the space through the first two quarters of 2009.
-the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has estimated the cost of building a Smart Grid at $165 billion over the next two decades – which comes to approximately $8 billion per year.
A minor health warning though. Both the report and article are focused on the US marketplace but provide original anaylsis as to what is happening in the US and what might happen in the UK. Both are well worth adding to your summer reading list.
Tags: Smart Grid, soft grid, software