Coming Soon: Intel in Smart Grid

In the relatively near future, you can expect to see some announcements about Intel getting its chips into  smart grid equipment like intelligent meters.

That's the word from Joe Jensen, general manager of the Intel Embedded Computing Group. The company has been working with a few companies on experimenting with Intel chips in smart grid equipment, he said.

The smart grid deals are part of an overall effort within Intel's embedded processor division to expand where possible. The company already sells chips that are incorporated into wind turbines. Some wind turbines have up to 16 processors that track everything from power output to the pitch of the blades. If the blades don't adjust to wind speed, they can shear off.

"A lot of the processing goes into preventing them from going into self-destruct," he said. "They vary the blade pitch constantly."

Intel is also working with General Electric and Grid Net to promote WiMax, the long range communications protocol, as a smart grid communication standard. The company earlier announced a three-year collaboration with the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC). The SGCC will run grid simulations on Intel servers, she said, as well as jointly set up a lab to experiment with ways to incorporate embedded chips technologies into transmission equipment. The SCGG controls the grid that covers 80 percent of mainland China.

Smart grid seems in many ways an ideal fit for Intel. A tremendous amount of power is wasted due to grid inefficiencies, so the opportunity is large. Second, improving grid efficiency largely revolves around hardware and software.

Why use Intel chips? The basic architecture is familiar to software developers and the same software will work on a wide variety of chips.

"You can have one code base," he said.