As I’ve written a few times in the recent past, I believe that we have the proverbial cart before the horse when it comes to smart grid. We tend to think of this concept as “futuristic,” like flying cars, when, in fact, it’s what underpins the transition the world is making right now in the direction of energy efficiency, conservation, and renewables.
Here’s Pike Research’s article on virtual power plants, which they define as: ”a system that relies upon software systems to remotely and automatically dispatch and optimize generation, demand-side, or storage resources (including plug-in electric vehicles and bi-directional inverters) in a single, secure web-connected system.”
With all the work going into this subject from the world’s most respected IT companies, e.g., Google and Cisco, does it really seem likely that the world of energy generation and distribution will continue to trudge along, essentially unchanged from the days of Edison? Not to me.
The world began to see the value of information a few decades ago. Very quickly, we had an Internet that delivers the information we want, instantaneously, to billions of users with their devices around the globe. Now the world is realizing that the dispatching of energy in real-time is also a big deal. Will the IT world rise to the occasion and make this happen? You can bet the ranch on it.
