Big Data: The Glow of the Smart Grid — Utilities 2.0

Thanks to Big Data, the utility industry may be on the verge of re-inventing itself.  The change is being driven by smart grid networks and smart meters.

Managing a utility company has been a very opaque process.  Utilities have had very little real-time data to help them monitor how well they are functioning.  Consider for example, an electric utility with potentially thousands of substations and relay units, with no real-time feedback about what is happening on the grid, there is little insight into any problems other than calls from users with complaints about outages.

The smart grid is an attempt to bring better clarity to the functioning of utility grids.  Smart grids deploy sensors at all points on the grid and each sensor continually collects and reports data about the environment where it is located.  To make it work means the deployment of at least many thousands of sensors, and cumulatively, all of those sensors will generate massive amounts of data.  The analysis of Smart Grid Big Data is becoming a big business.

A report by Pike Research finds that the market for smart grid data analytics could reach a cumulative $11.3 billion between 2011 to 2015.   Those revenues would come from software and services for smart grid vendors, utilities and consumers that are designed to extract intelligence from the massive amounts of data that will be collected from the advanced grid sensors.

Marianne Hedin, senior analyst at Pike Research, said that “the challenge for utilities in maximizing the benefits from smart grid data analytics is the ability to turn the huge volume of smart grid data into value.  As utilities move to the smart grid and expand it over time with the installation of thousands and sometimes millions of smart meters, they must address the most challenging question: How will they be able to manage and take advantage of the surge of data resulting from these smart meters and other intelligent devices on the smart grid?”

A number of vendors are beginning to go after the opportunity in the Smart Grid Data Analytics space.   This includes big-name companies like Accenture, Capgemini, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAIC, SAP and Siemens.  And there are much smaller, start-up sized companies going after the space too that include companies like GridGlo, Verdeeco, OPOWER, OSIsoft, Telvent, Ecologic Analytics and eMeter.