Big Utilities Stymied by Smart Grid Data, Says Forbes

According to an article on the Forbes.com web site, utility companies that have begun to incorporate the smart grid into their systems have little idea of what to do with the huge amounts of information generated. The smart grid is designed to transmit information about voltage, current and digital status measurements as often as 30 times per second at many points along the grid. However, the utility companies have no system for analyzing this much data. For now they are simply storing it. According to Forbes, electric utilities possessed 194 petabytes of data by 2009 (the entire collection of the Library of Congress is believed to amount to about 3 petabytes). A petabyte is 1000 terabytes. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.

Utility engineers are currently looking at ways in which their companies might utilize the information.