Musing on work to be done as summer ends

With the Labor Day weekend behind us, summer vacation season is officially over and we turn to things that need to be done between now and end of the year. This year the big topic in the utility industry arena has been Smart Grid in its various flavors and incarnations. Almost anything seems to attract the Smart Grid tag [including this blog post!]. It's one thing to put a tag on, but the real challenge is how is any given utility going to manage the flood of data that will come gushing in once that utility implements a communicating meter roll-out across its service area. As it is, most utilities are silo'd with different departments within the utility having differing priorities, data formats, systems and networks, etc. Now, when one overlays the complexity and potentially enormous volume of real-time data from thousands of meters, that is a truly daunting problem. While the utility revenue department has to sort out the accuracy of readings, dealing with customer complaints about what they perceive as suddenly higher bills, and so on, the DSM group has to figure out what and how much of these new data they can use for their tracking, reporting and M&V purposes.

We plan to focus attention to this issue over the coming months and will be looking for developments, news items and case histories related to this area.