Bright spots in the economy aren't easy to find nowadays, but they're there if you look hard enough. While the federal government bickers over its renewable energy and “green” strategies, several sectors that fall under that umbrella have been doing rather well, and some of them are predicted to do even better going forward. One of those sectors is for “smart grid” technologies, or solutions that help municipalities, companies and private citizens monitor and control their use of power.

In fact, the global smart grid market has seen impressive double-digit growth during the last five years, and this is expected to continue. The market for smart grid solutions is expected to reach approximately $57 billion by 2016, with a CAGR of 13 percent over the next five years.

Management consulting and market research company Lucintel recently took a broad look at the global smart grid market, and released its research in a new paper called “Growth Opportunities in the Global Smart Grid Market 2011 – 2016: Trends, Forecast, and Regional Analysis.”

Growth in renewable energy generation sources and their integration into a common grid is one of the major drivers in the smart grid market, says the company. While the costs of installing smart grid components such as smart meters and sensors, as well as the maintenance and monitoring expenses they incur, have tempered their growth somewhat, the rising costs of electricity generation, together with government incentives to promote green energy, distribution of smart meters and development in transmission facilities to provide energy to remote areas, will give the market a boost.

As to the regional breakdown of growth, Lucintel predicts that the uptake of smart grid solutions is expected to be the highest in Asia Pacific as a result of higher cumulative investments in those countries. The North American smart grid market will grow faster than that of Europe because of higher potential in North America to install renewable energy sources with low customer penetration at present, says the company.

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