What the SmartGrid Means to the Future
From the Interatinal Statesman WHAT was the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century? The motor car, perhaps, or the computer? In 2000 America’s National Academy of Engineering gave a different answer: “the vast networks of electrification”. These, the academy concluded, made most of the century’s other advances possible. But whereas cars, computers and so forth have become ever more sophisticated, power grids have remained, in essence, sets of dumb wires. Thomas Edison, a pioneer of electrification in the 1880s, would be able to run them. Power is fed into the grid from power stations in the hope that it will arrive in factories, offices and homes. To this day most utilities rely on consumers to tell them that the power is out—and may then have to put in a lot of detective work to discover the cause. This may be changing at last. A global movement is afoot to make grids “smart”. This means adding all kinds of information technology, such as sensors, digital meters an...