GE Explains Why We Need Smart Gird
Among many reasons for the Smart Grid, GE points out that we need “modern infrastructure.”
Take a look at GE’s It’s Your Smart Grid : New Infrastructure.
GE poses this very relevant POV:
“Our increasingly overburdened electrical infrastructure is quickly aging and has undergone little investment in the past 25 years. Even worse, most generation stations were built in the 1960s or earlier using even older technology. In fact, if Thomas Edison were here today, he would be all-too familiar with our electrical infrastructure—since not that much has changed. Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, would need to take a college course to understand the technology advances in communications. Cell phones and PDAs have replaced the rotary phones of our past, and technology is so advanced, we can access the Internet, take photos, and send written messages from our tiny cellular devices.”
Then GE asks this very important question:
“In a world so technologically advanced, why are we still working with a power grid that lacks the intelligence necessary to manage the needs of our 21st Century society? Edison might be asking the same exact question.”
Independently of the dozens of conflicting motivations for Smart Grid that I discussed in an earlier post, why aren’t electric utilities already taking maximum advantage of existing, new and emerging technologies . . . energy, IT, telecommunications, electronics . . . to maximize the economy and quality of service to consumers? Why should this cornerstone of quality of life and productivity of business (and energizer of the Internet and the world wide web) still be using largely the same technology, topology and techniques that as it was more than 100 years ago. This is the 21st Century, not the 19th Century.
Written by Steve Collier | Oct 06, 2009