With an annual spend of $3.8 billion globally by 2020—and a cumulative spend of $20 billion over the next nine years—grid operations analytics will be the smart grid’s next big growth market, according to study findings just released by Boston-based GTM Research.
A secondary area of significant investment for utilities will be consumer analytics. The report, “The Soft Grid 2013-2020: Big Data & Utility Analytics for Smart Grid,” forecasts that U.S. utilities, alone, will spend nearly $100 per home in these two areas over the next nine years.
With smart meters and distribution sensors beginning to populate “big data” from every corner of their territories, utilities must seek out data analytics solutions capable of managing this incoming data and realizing the promise of the smart grid. Grid operations analytics covers the use of data related to asset management, crisis management, fault detection and outage management, weather/location data, mobile workforce management and energy theft, according to the analysts... Read More
