- To date, the United States has invested between $8 billion and $20 billion on upgrades to the electric grid to create what we hope will be a smarter and more resilient grid. To put this in perspective, to update the remainder of our grid will take an additional $350-800 billion.
- Industry analysts predict that by 2050, electric vehicles will make up around 60% of the United States passenger vehicle fleet. If all those vehicles charged at one time, it would require a system capacity of 250 GW (gigawatts, or one-billion watts). Comparatively, the existing United States total electricity capacity sits at around 1,000 GW.
- As we expand smartgrid throughout the country, we will introduce significant amount of data into the utility and grid management industry. We will create a new "big data" in the utility sphere, which will require a new approach to the building of IT infrastructure. Currently, we use a centralized query model that requires significant computational capacity and network traffic. Moving to a Hadoop model, we can use smaller and smarter query algorithms across multiple nodes to reduce needed infrastructure and lower costs with faster performance.
- For the past couple of years, electricity smart grid cyber security has focused on "wall building". This is akin to the way the automobile industry used to build safety into vehicles through the "tonnage rule": build cars that are so massive that they can withstand collisions. The grid protection industry has begun to move toward a more nimble security approach, one focused on reliability and restoration. In much the same way that modern cars avoid collisions and protect the driver through tactically-placed structure, grid security now mixes cyber and physical infrastructure in ways that maintain electrical power service.
Enjoy the journey!
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