The smart set

摘要

National Instruments holds its annual convention, with more than 3,000 delegates, in its home town, the Texas state capital of Austin, towards the beginning of August. It's usually hot, but this year was exceptional. With the mercury touching 43°C, and everyone in Austin turning up the air-con system a notch or two, demand for power in Austin and across Texas set new records. The local utilities coped, but not by much. And ironically one of the hot topics covered by NI inside the ice-cool convention centre was the technology of helping utilities to manage these things better. Smart grids are a technology topic that's been hard to avoid this year and the reasons are not just to do with weather extremes. The old concept of a top-down grid structure is being challenged on all fronts. Power generation is no longer the preserve solely of centralised corporations: grids need flexibility to be able to handle input from new, small-scale and intermittent generators. Power flows that used to go just in one direction, out from the generator to the consumer, may now have to be two-way, as domestic solar or wind devices become commonplace. At the same time, power is pretty much a human right. Where a generation ago, power cuts and interruptions were an inconvenience, now they're unacceptable. And both quantity and quality are issues now. Today's grids need to be flexible, responsive, resilient... and competitive. In a word: smart.