Mining big data to transform electricity

Abstract

Energy is the largest industry in the world and power grids are among the world's largest machines. In a number of countries, those machines are now undergoing the most significant modernization in a century. The advent of a “smart grid”—the overlay of advanced sensing, communications, and controls on the electric network—is transforming utilities and other power sector players into IT companies. As information technologies are embedded across the entire system—from power plants through transmission lines, substations, distribution circuits, meters, and every device with a plug—utilities operational and information models will increasingly resemble those of telecom, Internet, or financial trading companies. This will require a fundamentally new approach to interoperability, speed, most challenging and most promising, and managing and making sense of vast new floods of data.