Data volumes in the utility sector projected to exceed telecom

Data volumes in the utility sector projected to exceed telecom:

At Gridweek last year, a speaker from Alabama Power, which among other intelligent devices has deployed over a million smart meters, said that he is seeing a 10,000X growth in the volume of data they have to deal with.
The new grid will be part of the "internet of things".  At the Soft Grid Conference this week, it was reported that a speaker from Proximetry estimated that there are currently 10 billion assets connected to the grid.  Many of these assets are smart devices that can report every microsecond, like a synchrophasor, or very 15 minutes like a smart meter. This adds up to a lot of data, much of it real-time.
Although the volume of data that utilities are currently handling is not very large compared to the data volumes in retail, finance and telecom companies, It was reported that Oracle's utility group has estimated that the data flow in utilities will be "1.5 to 2 times higher than the traditional communications industry".  That includes data coming from intelligent devices such as smart meters, synchrophasors, smart transformers, many devices in smart substations, and other intelligent devices and sensors.  Reportedly PG&E with millions of customers is planning on 4 petabytes data growth per year.
Not only do utility smart grid systems have to manage vastly increased volumes. but also have to process much of it real-time.  For example, not only monitoring transformer status (load and temperature) in real-time, but also provide analytics to the operator of the impact of the overloading and allow the operator to reconfigure the grid to reduce the load on overloaded transformers by redistributing load to others with available capacity.

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