January 1, 2010

The Smart Grid Has a Growth Spurt

Gail Reitenbach, PhD

Which country has the smartest grid? Which U.S. state has the most smart meters? What’s Google got to do with the grid? Answers to these questions and more can be found in our web exclusives. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find online.

Why is a power generation industry publication covering the smart grid, which most people tend to equate with managing electricity use (and maybe its transmission)? Of the many reasons, here are two of the most obvious.

Power generation is just the beginning of the electricity value chain, and thanks to changes up and down that chain, power generation — like every other link — will be affected by developments in smart grid technology. Slowly but surely, smart grid projects will have implications for those involved in everything from resource management planning (Do we build another gas-fired plant, or add a solar plant to an existing gas plant, or integrate distributed solar resources?) to staffing power generation projects (Should we scale back in thermal plants so we can afford more maintenance staff for distributed generation resources?).

Second, as more variable-output renewable resources get added to the grid, the operation and maintenance of baseload plants becomes more complex — at least until better grid-balancing tools are in place across the continent and around the globe.

As part of POWER’s January forecasting issue, we’re providing three angles on the state of the smart grid plus a few predictions about what its near-term future holds. In order to give our audience the option to explore further the smart grid developments that we address, we are publishing the full stories (which include a wealth of web links) at www.powermag.com. You’ll find links to the three stories previewed below in the Web Exclusives section of our home page, as well as in the issue archive list.