The FTTH Conference and Expo welcomed guest speaker David Wade, COO of the Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB) to discuss how his community is using fiber optic broadband to move from an electric grid to a smart grid.  Wade has seen numerous benefits for his city’s economic development thanks to broadband, and believes this is just one of them.

Wade says that the smart grid is having a huge impact on electricity consumers.  He introduced the smart grid as “intelligent, self-healing, and interactive,” and went on to enumerate the following benefits:

• Reduce outage times by 40%, which thereby reduces the costs of power disruptions correspondingly
• Real time interaction with millions of devices leading to reduce peak usage by 100MW
• Give consumers tools to use energy more efficiently, thereby helping manage usage and costs

Even with all of these benefits, Wade says they are still testing ways to further improve their system.  I’d say this is a great start!

Read more on Chattanoonga’s Smart Grid system here!

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Wednesday evening, members of the DC chapter of the Internet Society gathered at the National Library of Medicine for the latest in their Internet 2020 series, Developing a National Smart Grid.  As NextGenWeb often emphasizes, technology and environmental efficiency are increasingly intertwined, so this was a very timely topic for an Internet group.

Fred Baker, Fellow at Cisco Systems and former Chairman of the IETF, started the discussion with an explanation of what the Smart Grid actually is.  He described how standards relate to how electricity moves around among consumers, buildings, substations, control centers, and more. With that, there are many functional requirements for communication. “The Network should enable an application in a particular domain to communicate with an application in any other domain in the information network, with proper management control over who and where applications can be interconnected.”

Katherine Hamilton, President of the GridWise Alliance, advocates for a smarter grid on behalf of a coalition comprised of hundreds of large and small enterprises. “The Smart Grid allows stakeholders to have more choices as well as participate in their energy choices.  It enables a more reliable, more flexible, more efficient, more secure, cleaner electric grid.”  Hamilton believes strongly in the consumer empowerment that the “energy Internet” provides.

Watch the interviews below with Hamilton and Sally Wentworth, Senior Manager for Public Policy at ISOC, to delve deeper into the connections between energy, broadband, technology, and consumers.  We will link to the event in its entirety as soon as it’s available.

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