PG&E is installing 10,000 smart meters a day and wants to equip 5m homes by the end of 2011.More intelligence in the grid would also help integrate renewable sources of electricity, such as solar panels or wind turbines.
That system gives utilities more intelligence about their grid and saves them money by more easily pinpointing trouble spots and automatically fixing some problems.
How is GridGlo's offering different from those of well-established smart grid intelligence businesses, like OPOWER, Silver Spring Networks and Comverge?
To assume monitoring and intelligence in the grid and to communicate between remote stations and a central master one, a communication system needs to be associated to the power grid of the global production equipment.
The Distributed Grid Intelligences (DGIs) in the prototype can group specific peers to exchange the power among the power demands and supplies.
To achieve intelligence in the future grid, a highly accurate state estimation is necessary as it is a prerequisite for many key functionalities in the successful operation of the power grid.
This should be done by distributing intelligence over the entire grid, thereby, the intermittent production of renewable energy, customer consumption and electricity storage in electrical vehicles (EVs) could be managed in real time.
Its Smarter Planet initiative (which is intended to inject more intelligence into, say, power grids and transport systems) is said to have originated in one of IBM's "jams", online brainstorming sessions where all employees and sometimes even family members are welcome.
With the exception of some simple sensors located at a minority of substations, there is little "intelligence" embedded in today's grid.
There is a cuteness factor here, but it is quickly overruled by the blazing colors, assorted stripes, dots, checks, swirls and grids and abstract intelligence evident in the 200-plus examples.
Actually, this does sound like a lot of scare mongering and, if Chinese intelligence did control the power grids I doubt Wired would get the scoop before, say, the NSA.
