Power Engineering Magazine Publishes Microsoft View on the Future Energy Ecosystem

Power Engineering, the highest circulation utility trade magazine in the United States, carries in its July edition a story co-written by Larry Cochrane, our utilities technology strategist, and myself, on “Future Opportunities for the Energy Ecosystem.” It’s the Peak Load feature article. In the story, we note that:

The industry is entering an unprecedented era, one rich with innovation around energy-producing equipment and active participation from consumers in the overall energy ecosystem. The era will see new solutions such as renewables, energy storage and demand response that will radically change the way we think about power systems.

In this new era, solutions to maintain the grid will range from the smallest sensor for measuring and exposing energy use and carbon footprints to high-performance streaming complex event processing. To control the growing number of devices, grid solutions will need the capability to handle Internet-scale data acquisition. They will also need the scale to handle large, complex, real-time hierarchical network reliability solutions, as well as massive data storage and analysis. All of that said, flexibility is critical because distributed generation or demand response that will work in one area may not work in another, displacing today’s radial, homogenous paradigm.

Check it out! – Jon Arnold

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