Tag Archives | Self-healing grid
Smart microgrid

The Modern Microgrid: Three Major Benefits

As we’ve written previously on this blog, microgrids are not a new concept. They have existed in one form or another for decades. But microgrids today provide new capabilities that offer great promise, and have sparked significant interest. Here are three major benefits offered by modern microgrids: A more resilient energy supply. Particularly following Hurricane [...]

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Setting the Bar for Reliability Higher at Networked Grid 2013

A recent story by the AP on power reliability has received a lot of attention. The gist of the article is that even though the cost of electricity has gone up over the last decade, power reliability has actually declined. In my view, a major reason for this discrepancy is that we under-invested in the [...]

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Managing the Smart Grid

We still have a long way to go in building a truly smart grid in the U.S., but smart grid deployments have increased dramatically in recent years. As deployments have grown, so has the need to develop new tools to manage smart grid technology. Meter data management (MDM) and analytics software have gotten lots of [...]

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Self-Healing Smart Grids and the Superstorm

A major benefit of smart grid technology—and self-healing solutions in particular—is that they can reduce and even eliminate power outages. But when we confront a massive storm like Hurricane Sandy, does this technology really help? Major sections of the power grid in affected regions experienced significant damage. In fact, in many areas, utilities don’t simply [...]

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India Power Outages Shine a Spotlight on Microgrids

Much of the reporting on India’s recent power outages focused on the number of people who lost power, which is a huge number. But one of the things I found most interesting is the number of people and businesses that didn’t. The outage was not the catastrophe it could have been because many power users [...]

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The Heart of Distribution Automation? It’s the Brain

As utilities have ramped up distribution automation programs in recent years, it seems that use of the term DA has become fairly loose. EPRI has defined DA as “a set of intelligent sensors, processors, and communication technologies that enables an electric utility to remotely monitor and coordinate its distribution assets, and operate these assets in [...]

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