Smart grid global investment
December 15, 2011
Market research company, IC Insights has estimated that total global spending on smart grid technologies will reach approximately $100 billion in 2011with annual investments forecast to nearly double to $196.9 billion in 2015. These estimates exclude renewable energy systems, power plants, and “smart” home appliances, but cover the smart grid infrastructure, electrical storage systems, smart meters, and information technology investments.
Smart grids and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) along with the installation of smart meters will bring major changes to home appliances and other residential electrical systems so that they can interact and communicate with power-utility companies and customers.
These changes include:
• the ability to communicate with energy-efficient buildings and “smart” home appliances to save electricity costs and automatically balance loads (consumption) with the output of existing power plants and the network’s overall capacity.
• employ distributed electrical-energy storage systems to handle peak-demand periods while lowering the need for additional power plants.
• smart power grids are also being designed to accommodate large-scale recharging of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid gasoline/electric car. These grids are necessary to add new renewable energy sources to the public electricity networks such as solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines.
New “smart” household systems and home area networks (HANs) are being equipped with AMI interfaces to the power grid’s smart meters which will enable home appliances and other residential systems to automatically schedule and adjust their operations and energy use based on variable electricity rates and what the customer wants.
Smart meters and connected energy-aware home and business systems is a new marketplace for semiconductors. Worldwide revenues for semiconductors in smart meters are forecast to become nearly a $1.1 billion market in 2015 compared to $524 million in 2010. This constitutes a 2010-2015 average annual growth of 15.3%.
