Since the term Smart Grid encompasses everything from Power Generation to consumer usage at home and offices, the work on developing the Smart Grid affects a whole range of industries. A recent article in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine looked at how the developments in the Smart Grid arena were affecting companies traditionally working on signal processing applications.

[I really wish the IEEE and ACM would open up their databases to the general public. I don’t see the point of hiding all the papers behind a pay-wall.  Well, this is a topic for another post some other day. For now, here’s the citation to the article: R. Schneiderman, “Smart Grid Represents a Potentially Huge Market for the Electronics Industry”, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Sept. 2010, Volume: 27 Issue: 5, page(s): 8 – 15.]

Signal processing gets used in all communciation technologies. It is not surprising that with the growth in all the Smart Grid communication technologies, the signal processing industry will also see a big gain. However, there are two other unlikely areas that will contribute to the growth of this industry: First, renewable sources such as Wind Mills will require sophisticated controls and signal processing.  As expected, Solar will not have as many requirements as Wind because of fewer moving parts in the generation equipment. Second, substation monitoring and power quality control will use a lot of signal processing power.

Back in communication arena, it is essentially a battle of wireless standards. This battle is mainly concentrated at the home area network since that is where customers will experience the benefits of the Smart Grid. Standards such as Bluetooth, Zigbee and other variants are duking it out. There are two other technologies in the Smart Grid world that do not get enough attention: Power Line Communications (PLC) and DC power transmissions. The HomeGrid Forum is actively promoting power line communications. They have much better market penetration in Europe than in the US. With all the push towards a wireless Home Area Networking, I am skeptical about its adoption in the US. Another un-scientific indication of decline: the HomeGrid Forum’s blog has not been updated since December 2010. However, chip manufacturers such as Intel and TI have invested in this technology. TI has a line of MCUs targetting PLC.

DC power transmissions on the other hand is not trying to replace any existing technologies. With the introduction of various distributed energy sources, DC transmission might make better sense in certain situations. For example, off-shore wind generation stations are expected to use DC transmission.

Overall, the plans of chip manufacturers such as TI, Analog Devices and others in the signal processing area will give a good indication of the Smart Grids progress.