Smart Grid

Introduction

The inception of the smart grid

With no warning, over 50 million people in the Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, lost power in August 2003. Everyone's first reaction was, how could this happen and why was it so widespread? But once the initial investigations of the massive failure of the grid were conducted and appropriate blame was placed on the guilty parties, the focus of attention shifted to how can we avoid a similar accident in the future.

The first obvious answer was to find ways to make the grid more intelligent, more reliable, and more secure. Among the suggestions made were to make the grid self-detecting and self-healing, so that future accidents could be detected at an early stage, resolved, or isolated to avoid ...