The Emerging Enernet: Convergence of the Smart Grid with the Internet of Things

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet and a well-known technology visionary, once said, Over the past 63 years, we met world needs for cheap and clean information by building the Internet. Over the next 63 years, we will meet world needs for cheap and clean energy by building the Enernet. The Internet has resulted from revolutionary advances in electronics, telecommunications and information technologies, devices, and applications. Although it began as an Internet that connected people, by 2008 it connected more things than people. This exponential growth has primarily been as an Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco has predicted that 50 billion new connections will be made in this IoT by 2020. The U.S. electric utility grid has, until now, been a patchwork of monolithic, weakly interconnected, synchronous ac grids powered by a few thousand very large power plants that are centrally monitored and controlled. For a variety of reasons, this legacy grid approach is proving to be nonviable for the present and the future. It is being supplemented and may ultimately be supplanted by many smaller networks with literally millions of distributed generation, storage, and energy management nodes. The grid is exploding into a network of things. Many consider it to be the largest example of an IoT.