Smart Grid Technologies: Coming To A Utility Near You

Today's energy companies face an unprecedented quandary of regulatory requirements, market pressures, and public scrutiny that, in combination, act to disrupt traditional approaches to cutting costs and servicing consumers. With the recent federal stimulus package providing further incentive toward action, many utilities are actively pursuing a series of "smart grid" investments that enable better two-way communications with consumers, provide more insights into the state of network operations, and accommodate emerging alternative sources of power generation. As utilities seek to fundamentally shift how they operate, application development and delivery professionals will face new challenges in applying new software and hardware technologies, in implementing a disruptive technology such as smart grid, and in choosing how to align their organizations with the various vendor solution ecosystems that can help tame deployment complexities.