Smart Grids: More Tolstoy, less Dickens

Filed under Green Energy, by Stephen Baker on June 1

I was talking with Jeffrey Taft, the lead architect for smart grids at Accenture. He came up with a literary description for the digital data pouring through electrical networks. In traditional dumb grids, he said, create enough data every second to fill Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (a book most of us could read on a rainy day). A smart grid, by contrast, generates 846 copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

I couldn’t find in a quick search how many words those two books have. I’ve progressed over the last decade to thinking of data in terms of songs, and not text. But in any case, smart grids produce loads of data. Taft is helping to lead an ambitious pilot “intelligent city” project in Boulder, Colo.

The challenge, he says, is to “manage that data and transform it into information through analytics. That’s the key problem with smart grids. It’s the info management problem where all the grief is.”

In the short term, most of the smarts will be focused on finding outages and other problems, and responding to them quickly and with laser focus. This might mean that a few houses will be dark, instead of an entire neighborhood. Eventually, the Accenture team hopes to study the patterns of outages, spot problems before they develop, and take preemptive action.

The Boulder project, which is in its final stage of deployment, also will provide lots more information to consumers about their energy use. Here’s betting that Boulder, with its green and highly educated population, will put this info to use and consume electricity more wisely.

The Boulder project is a bid by Xcel Energy to create a green and scalable next-gen utility. Implementation should be done by the end of June, Taft says. They’ll have an idea about the business case by the end of the year.