Smart grid systems require a backbone of telecommunications infrastructure to facilitate delivery to clients. The optimal infrastructure for the future of smart grids is being debated currently as smart grid companies face a dilemma about whether to use the infrastructure already in place through agreements with wireless cellular carriers or to build private communications infrastructure, as water, gas, and electric companies do.
While there are certainly positives and negatives for both approaches, many industry and telecommunication experts have conjectured that the current cellular networks provide a more than adequate solution from an effectiveness and cost standpoint. Here are some reasons why cellular networks hold an advantage over private “mesh” networks:
The United States power grid is a 900,000 mile-long marvel of engineering, yet, for all its complexities it has not exploited something that has been under the hood of your car for years- the ability to store power for future use. In this basic concept lies the potential for synergy between smart grid technology and renewable energy initiatives. For years, renewable power has been altogether too intermittent to become pervasive within our rigid and antiquated power grid. While the issue hasn’t been completely resolved, new innovations in smart grid technology, as well as breakthroughs in electric storage capacity and production of energy go a long way toward solving this problem.
One of the biggest barriers to the full implementation of Smart Grid technology, like with many innovative processes, lies in the capacity for our current infrastructure to handle revolutionary new technology. Even amongst power and smart grid industry experts, the needed bandwidth capacity of proposed “smart” updates is highly contentious. Long-term telecommunications bandwidth estimates are currently rough, at best. This is due to industry-wide inexperience with the long-term forecasts of two-way demand side management, and “smart” monitoring solutions.