Smart grid

A smart grid is an electricity network that uses digital and other advanced technologies to monitor and manage the transport of electricity from all generation sources to meet the varying electricity demands of end-users.

‘Energy transition’, ‘electrical grid transformation’, ‘Power Shifts’; what is all that buzz?

—confused participant of Power Shifts and really cool person

— To understand the daunting task of creating a sustainable future energy system, one must first define the efficiency of the current systems, which touch three key end-use sectors; electricity, heating and transport. The so-called ‘energy transition’ or transformation entails not only the re-design of all three sectors from production to consumption, but also their convergence in technological, societal and economic terms.

This vision is built around the modernisation of the electrical grid, with the gradual development of ‘smart grids’, which use information and communication technologies (ICT) to manage electricity more efficiently while adding new nodes to the electrical grid such as Renewable Energy Sources (RES), thus turning households into a consumer-producer-hybrid. The promise of the smart grid is to enable a new paradigm with a reduced energy cost and the environmental benefits of RES.