Today’s smart grid revolution is driven by energy and sustainability concerns. But utility, engineering, technology and software firms need to get behind the hype to understand the projects and partnerships characterizing the market today, and the companies and solutions with high potential to shape the future smart grid. They must also navigate the practical complexities of a dynamic smart grid ecosystem by addressing issues such as interoperability, transmission, distribution, metering, connecting consumers and cyber security.

What does 2012 hold for the smart grid market? With global utilities on the precipice of large-scale smart grid technology deployment, vendors are proliferating and evolving to meet the complexities and requirements of their utility clients. As a result, utilities are flooded by solutions providers vying for their business and are now approaching strategic crossroads that will set the course of their smart grid roadmaps.

This year, technology will drive the industry forward to Smart Grid 2.0. Data analytics software will help utilities put to good use the data now pouring in from over 150 million installed smart meters globally. This year will see consumer getting new options for dynamic pricing, detailed usage information options, and prepayment from upgraded utility IT systems. We saw new consumer products emerge in 2011, and 2012 will be the year that brings wide adoption of these exciting new energy management devices, especially smart thermostats. And, renewables will continue their march across the world, as more businesses and residences begin adding power to the grid along with continued renewable initiatives by utilities. Changes in IT technology will able to better manage and control these resources in 2012.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key focus areas in the Utility Industry today. It is a leap towards cleaner and energy efficient options and, opens the doors towards tomorrow’s Smart Grid. It transforms the entire Utility Business Process value chain and has an impact on operations, customers and stakeholders. Given the large scale impact of this implementation, success assurance is a big challenge in AMI implementations.

It’s no secret that the smarter your infrastructure gets, the more data you have at your disposal. But as anyone who has implemented a smart grid solution knows, dealing with petabytes of data is no simple task. In addition, just having lots of data doesn’t mean you’ll gain a better understanding of your business, or be able to make better decisions, than before. To do that, you also need software to transform the data into information you can use. So what’s the answer?

Ten years ago, BlackBerry 5810 was the coolest gadget for business people to communicate over 50kbps GPRS link. Today you can buy new iPad with 4G LTE at around 6 to 7Mbps. What lessons does power industry learn from this? Five years ago early adopters of AMI were astounded by 100kbps. Once they had it, they started to devour – they noticed that it was not sufficient for remote firmware update, getting more power quality data, and so on. Furthermore, it was so natural that those early adopters started to think of leveraging AMI to cover distribution network, which is still left as a blind spot in between smart meters and substations in terms of visibility and control from remote operation center.