The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Within five years of the rollout, the data produced by smart meters was proving essential to the creation of predictive models of electricity use, minute by minute, as well as providing occasional real-time data about peaks and troughs in variable and distributed electricity production. And they were enabling real-time “demand-response,” which is to say that they gave the utility the capacity to ask big electricity consumers to ramp down consumption as a means of balancing the grid. Rather than going offline and using diesel generators to provide backup power for a bit while the utility straightened things out, smart meters can be linked to efficient buildings that automatically deploy grid-scale conservation. At times this is accomplished by something as simple as dimming the lights. Negawatts, in other words, can now be ordered up by the utility and delivered by an Albertsons. Network enough of these power-savers into a flexible, smart piece of software, and you have your platform.