The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Since 2000, however, not only is there far more information pouring into utility databases—a product of the widespread introduction of computerization at many points in the system, of which digital “smart” meters are the most infamous—but that information is treated as proprietary. Electricity trading, in this way, fails to be laissez-faire capitalism because nobody quite has access to the information necessary to make real-time decisions about how to manage their systems, and thus also their capital. Not even, oddly, the utilities themselves, since they now have so much information to contend with that most of it sits unprocessed in giant servers called “historians.” Big data has become just another modern way to use up electricity.