In the US, Obama’s green stimulus package has now been passed by Congress and will accelerate investment in the smart grid. Smart grid investments are also required around the world – and it is to be hoped that governments elsewhere will follow the US lead on investment in this sector.
The logic for investing in a smart grid is irrefutable. A smart grid might perhaps be described as the infrastructure for the clean tech industrial revolution. A smart grid will enable us to take fuller advantage of renewable energy resources and will also offer significant improvements in energy efficiency. We’ve focused on electricity in this publication – but many smart grid applications, such as smart metering, also apply to the water industry.
There are smart applications across the full spectrum of the grid. Devices for the home enable the consumer, at the grass roots of the cleantech revolution, to monitor and reduce electricity consumption. At the other end of the scale, technology is required to regulate intermittent energy flows from large arrays of offshore wind turbines. Smart grid issues overlap with themes such as distributed generation (which we’ve touched on previously) – and with the vision of a future infrastructure of electric vehicles. Developments in storage technology will be critical for a fully optimized smart grid in the future.
When we started to build our lists of key players in the smart grid sector we thought we would discuss 20 or 25 companies. The list kept growing and eventually we decided we had to stop somewhere. So we have included profiles of 50 companies this time. It’s clear, however, that this is an industry which is growing rapidly and pulling in players from established industry sectors. In our next publication on the smart grid we expect to be discussing the Smart Grid 100.
Yours Sincerely,
Anne McIvor
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