In recent years, studies have found that in developing countries, light data from space might actually tell you more about a city’s economy than the limited data on the ground. Since then, if you can imagine the animated GIF, cities and their luminous electricity have spread across the world, stringing the earth with glittering urbanism.īut beyond their cosmic aesthetics, those lights mean something. We can’t peer down from the moon to see what it looked like before the Industrial Revolution, but it’s safe to say it was, well, dark. There's a little bit of a renaissance going on in that space. It's something I'm personally passionate about.Cities have turned earth into a kind of planetary nightlight. There's a need for a technically-oriented workforce and it's really an American competitive thing that appears in virtually every industry. It's highlighted in smart grid because of the power engineering piece of it, as we've historically underinvested in the space. needs to continue to focus on building the pipeline of people who can work in this environment. The government plays a part in that - making sure that there's focus on STEM education. We want to support an ecosystem that has as much innovation as possible into it, where ideas can easily be translated into benefit. Those regulations may have to change, because the technology is changing a little bit.Īs for companies, I don't know that any one company is too worried about how much money any other company makes. That works pretty well in the system today. For regulation, I'm thinking NERC, where there's some fundamental safety and energy reliability requirement. We've done that with a couple of levers: regulation and standards. How do you make sure it's reliable and stable and secure? I would argue it is now. What we're talking about is making it more intelligent. It's already in play in the system today. How do you ensure stability with all these different players involved? SmartPlanet: Cisco, IBM, Siemens, and countless smaller companies - everyone wants a piece of of the 'smart,' 'intelligent,' 'connected' grid, but it's all got to work together. When you boil down the benefit, people have a fear that you're adding a lot of cost to the system, but can you guarantee a specific benefit? The answer to that is on either side: you either raise the benefit or lower the cost. How come we don't have 100 percent of our power from wind power? The challenge is really an innovation challenge - getting the technology into the market at the right price point. We have a very high bar of moving new technology into this arena.Īs technologies become more cost effective, we still have this hurdle of price performance. We take for granted that electricity in the United States is very reliable, very stable and very cheap. There's a reason the power system looks the way it does. "Smart grid" is hard - it's difficult to talk about the "New Energy Era" with so many components to it. PC: Because of the diversity of the conversation, how we ever got two words to cover everything we're talking about is sort of a dramatic simplification. SmartPlanet: What are your most difficult challenges right now? In the nation's capitol this week for his company's Smart Grid Tour - which conveniently coincides with GridWeek 2010 - Camuti's goal is to educate utility companies and industrial clients about how the smart grid is the way of the future. It's been a busy couple of days for Camuti, smart grid chief for German conglomerate Siemens, and he's no doubt had to make this abbreviated elevator pitch more than once. "Oh." The barista places his coffee on the counter. "It's about our power distribution system, and how we need to bring to state-of-the-art technology to it to achieve our goals of energy independence." "What's smart grid?"Ĭamuti ever so slightly cringes - after all, he hasn't yet had his morning coffee - takes a breath and begins. The barista replies without missing a beat. "Actually, it's being built by the company I work for, about something called 'smart grid.' " His gaze breaks, and he replies quickly, "I have no idea." "Any idea what that is?" a barista asks him.
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