Threats to the electric power structure are particularly high-profile, given the ubiquity and importance of electricity to modern civilization. Hackers have proven adept at infiltrating and altering myriad systems, including industrial, institutional, and governmental computer-driven networks (and major political campaigns). It applies to much of interconnected modern society.
The threat is not confined to electric systems. Do they, by their nature, offer cybersecurity threats, those opportunities for malevolent forces to intrude, disrupt, or destroy? The down side to this vision is how those interconnections-driven by modern computer technologies, data flow, and information management-interact with each other. A smart grid employs innovative products and services together with intelligent monitoring, control, communication, and self-healing technologies …” The best definition of the smart grid comes from the European Union Commission Task Force for Smart Grids: “A Smart Grid is an electricity network that can cost efficiently integrate the behavior and actions of all users connected to it-generators, consumers and those that do both-in order to ensure economically efficient, sustainable power systems with low losses and high levels of quality and security of supply and safety. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” The Interconnected Smart Grid
It also accommodates distributed power generation and microgrids, enhances the value of electric vehicles, and gives customers greater choices of how and when to use electricity.Įlectric energy pioneer and visionary Nikola Tesla in 1926 said, “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain… and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. That kind of mutual intelligence offers solid benefits, including energy management, increased reliability and resilience, and integration of intermittent renewable energy generation and storage. Two-way communication among generators, transmitters, and customers is the smart grid’s key.
But the smart grid also has a dark side, born of the interconnected nature that is also the source of its promise. T he smart grid, now some 15 years in development and still far from mature, offers potential benefits to utilities, electric generators, and customers. It gives consumers more control over how and when they use power-but it has a dark side. The smart grid offers great promise to transform the electric system, enabling two-way communication between providers and consumers over the network, and allowing new services that can save electricity and reduce costs.
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