Smart Grids are seen as a major step in improving our age-old electricity grid.
The objectives are:
- to change the behaviour of consumers so the demand peak is reduced significantly
- to allow for controlled feed-in of decentralized power plants/home power generation
- to manage the growing numbers of cars that will have batteries and are hungry for electric power
Great idea but the basic prerequisite was lacking: a common communication protocol between all parties involved, preferable without Intellectual Property hindrances. Apparently every company involved dreamed of becoming the new Microsoft…..
At last the IEEE has started to pick up the gavel: a standardization committee has been formed.
