Between the Poles

The state of malware on the internet or why utilities need to prioritize cyber security

In its essence smart grid is about turning the power grid into an internet of intelligent devices.  That means that the next generation  power grid will be susceptible to all the cybersecurity issues that affect the internet.   This makes cybersecurity a priority for every utility that is implementing some form of a smart grid.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto, the keynote speaker was Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure, who has been chasing cybersecurity problems since the 1990's and has been responsoble for taking down a number of internet malware exploits.  He gave a very current assessment of today's cybercrime. 

Cybercrime on the internet today is very different from a decade ago  when it involved "kids" with no real motive, who just did it because they could. 

Now there are three categories of people who indulge in cyber expolits and they all have motives.

1. Criminals - organized crime groups (in MiKko's experience primarily in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, China, but all over the world) whose motive is money
2. Hacktivists - groups with a political agenda and whose motive is protest
3. Governments - both totalitarian and democratic governments are involved in offensive malware with a variety of motives, espionage and military are obvious ones, but governments also target malware on their own citizens

Criminals

Mikko gave an example of a criminal cyber exploit involving credit card theft but with a wrinkle.    Typically when this activity is tracked to a particular account, the ISP is notified and will shutdown the account.  But in this case the ISP was owned by a criminal.  When notified he would promise to would look into the problem, but wouldn't take any action except charging the account owner more for hosting.  Hosting would get to be very expensive for an account holder if it got a lot of attention from the credit card companies.  The ISP owner bought a lot of real estate with the money he made - 155 properties have been identified.  He is currently awaiting trial.

Another example of a criminal exploit is banking trojans.  The best known is called "Zero-access" and has infected 9 million computers.  The way it generates revenue is by interrupting your on-line banking session and displaying what appears to be a message from your national police force ( it is a different "police force" depending on the country where you are using your computer) telling you that illegal financial acitivities have been traced to your account and your access the the account has been disabled.  This all sounds legit, until it goes on to say that if you pay a $100 fine, access will be restored.  And it provides a legitimate way for you to transfer the money.

One of the surprising changes in cyber crime is that until recently it has involved exploits targetting computers running Windows.  Millions of Windows machines are infected every year.  But the 75 % of the world's servers that run Linux have not been affected. (Last quarter for the first time Linux passed Windows in number of new installations.)

But now Linux, in the form of Android on smart phones, has a malware problem.  The number of devices affected by attacks currently number in the thousands, but this is increasing rapidly and involves mostly criminals, not hacktivists or governments.

Hacktivists

One of the best known hacking by hacktivists involves a programmer who wanted to customize his Playstation software.  Unwisely Sony sent its lawyers after him, which immediately became known and had the effect that Sony became a favourite target of the hacker community.

In an interesting contrast, a programmer who wanted to customize his IPhone, was hired by Apple.

Governments

The best known is the stuxnet worm that targeted Iran's uranium centrifuge equipment running Siemens Step7 software.  The source of this exploit is suspected to be a Western government.  Mikko presented a fascinating story about how this exploit was traced and identified from public TV broadcasts.

ARAMCO, the largest company in the world, was attacked by an expoit that shut down 75% of its computers.  A Middle Eastern government is the prime suspect.

The "red october" exploit has just been identified by Kapersky and the source is suspected to be the government in the Far East.  This exploit involves sending what looks like innocuous official and academic articles to government officials which then infects their computer with a trojan.

But governments also use malware against their own citizens.  Mikko mentioned Syria, the previous regime in Egypt, but also the US, Germany and the UK.

In the latter cases, this typically involves trojans that are used during criminal investigation to track the communications of suspects and is similar to telephone tapping.  Mikko described a fascinating example where a person suspected of criminal activity was separated from his luggage and questioned by Customs and Immigration at an airport.  The questioning was bogus, but while he was being questioned, officials went through his luggage, found his computer and installed a trojan on it.  He was subsequently found to be innocent. The officials then had to stage the same airport exercise to get the trojan off of his computer.

This was a fascinating presentation which I suspect created in the utilities folks in the audience a significantly heightened awareness of how seriously the cybersecurity challenge to the electirc power grid must be treated.

Utilities need to develop a social media strategy

I have blogged before about the use of social media by utilties to communicate with the public.  Colorado Springs Utilties used Facebook during the Colorado forest fires to keep people apprised of the status of the fires.  As another example, Southern California Edison (@socaledison) uses Twitter to report extreme weather alerts, outages, and restoration progress.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto there were two presentation that focussed on social media, primarily for customer interaction management.  But utilities are just beginning scratch the surface in this area, so the talks were intended to make the audience aware of just how pervasive social media has become.

Facebook
FB has a billion users. If it were a country, FB would be the third largest. Half of the users use mobile devices.  The average user spends 5 hours a week on FB.  FB supports 70 languages.  FB users used to be primarily a younger crowd, but the older age groups are now growing faster.  There are about an equal number of male and female users.  For the Canadians out there, apparently Tim Hortons has 2 million "friends" on FB.

Twitter
140 million active users, 55% of them women. 41% of users use smartphones to tweet.

Youtube
Youtube has become the 2nd largest search engine, after Google.

Pinterest
25 million users, 72% of them women. 

These are very  impressive statistics, and the clear message is that in this time of the smart grid and in that context the much greater importance of the customer relationship utilities need to prioritize the development of a social media strategy.

Moving from 2D design to 3D design standards in electricity distribution

The Utilities Standards Forum (USF) is an organization representing about 50 Ontario electricity distribution companies.  Its goal is collaboratively to define standards for its members to reduce duplication of effort.  

The USF has developed design standards for electricity distribution that meet the requirements of Ontario Regulation 22/04 under the Electricity Act of 1998.  Currently these are in the form of paper or PDF documents containing 2D isometric views of the components used in electricity distribution such as insulators, clamps, surge arrestors, fuse-cutouts, terminations, cross arms, cable guards, and other types of equipment.

There is pressure to move to 3D design standards.  There are several motivations for this.  In this time of the challenge of an aging workforce in the utility industry, increasing the efficiency of engineers and designers is an important motivator.  But another equally important one is the increasing number of younger designers and engineers that have been brought up in  3D digital world and want to work in a modern 3D environment.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto an overview of the new 3D design standards was presented by Ron Lapier and Lori Gallauger of the USF.  The new 3D standard is a major step forward in two ways.  First of all the components required for electricity distribution design are now 3D so that electricity distribution design can be performed in a 3D environment.  But equally important USF intends to make them available digitally in the form of a library of DWG files containing 3D objects that can be brought into a 3D CAD environment and integrated with other components to create a completely 3D representation of an  electricity distribution design.  The design can be viewed and manipulated in 3D.  As well 2D drawings for construction can be generated from the 3d model.  The components have real world coordinates so that clearances and dimensions can be directly measured from the 3D model.

Using energy density mapping to target customers for consumer energy conservation programs

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto today, Cory Slinger of Horizon Utilities provided an update on Horizon's energy mapping for conservation and demand management (CDM).   I have blogged about Horizon's energy density mapping initiative before.  The objective of the initiative is to try to take the guesswork out of identifying customers on whom to target conservation and demand management (CDM) programs. 

Horizon is required to meet CDM objectives mandated by the Ontario Energy Board (OEB). The OEB has established hard targets for 2011-2014 for peak demand and energy consumption for each electricity distribution company (LDC) in Ontario.  In the case of Horizon their objectives are to reduce peak demand by 5.6% and consumption by 4.9%.  The mandated targets are aggressive and Horizon has found that it needs to look at new ways to identify customers with high energy footprints and energy density mapping is one of the key technologies that they are looking to to help them meet their CDM goals.  One of the distinguishing characteristics of Horizon's approach to CDM is that they are treating it as a marketing challenge.

Horizon has partnered with public organizations including Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC), Teranet, and others to provide them with detailed building and property information such as building age, sun exposure, heating type, air conditioning, and parcel data.  They also partnered with NRCan/CanmetENERGY for standard metrics for different building types, with Environics for Prizm lifestyle profiles and data, and with Canadian Urban Institute who manage the GIS.

All of this data has been brought together and managed in a GIS.  The GIS not only provides data management, but also has tools for linking different data sets using a common index.  For example, in the raw data there was no common index that could link Horizon's electricity usage data and Terranet's parcel files.  By using the GPS coordinates of each meter it was possible to link customer electricity usage data to specific parcels.

Another interesting aspect of Horizon's approach related to privacy.  Horizon's energy density mapping is highly granular, at the building level, which means there is the risk of identifiable individual energy usage information.  To ensure privacy, they have followed the Ontario Privacy Commissioner's Privacy by Design guidelines to endure that no electricity usage information can be traced to individual customers.

The intention is to roll out targeted campaigns in 2013 to identify customers who are likely to respond to CDM programs.  Horizon have already piloted a campaign in which they sent letters to every customer with an air conditioner, alltogether about 90,000 customers.  They found that the response was very poor, only about 3,800 signed up. [Correction: 331 responses were received on a mailout of about 90,000, which was much less than Horizon had hoped for. 3,800 is the total number of people who have signed up since June of 2012.  Thanks to Cory Slinger for the clarification.] They also expected that the group that would be most interested in the CDM program would be the younger, more enrvironmentally aware, affluent segment.  But to their surprise when they looked at the data more closely using demographic profiles for different neighbourhoods, they found that people in the lower midde income and older age brackets were the most responsive to the CDM program and that the primary motivation for this group is financial,  reducing their electrciity bills.  The next CDM campaign will focus on this customer segment.  Using paired campaigns is the approach they will follow throughout 2013 and 2014.  The end goal is a set of best practices for CDM programs based on their experience in these campaigns.

Privacy by Design: Protecting the privacy of consumer electricity usage data

I blogged recently about the rules for protecting consumer electric power usage data collected by utilities in California.  I found this on the Center for Spatial Law and Policy site.  The California Public Utilities Commision, which regulates electric power in California, has defined the rules for providing access to and protecting the privacy of consumer electric power usage data collected by smart meters in California.

At  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto last week, Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and one of the people who have raised the profile of data privacy, gave an enlightening overview of the important privacy issues as they relate to smart grid, and especially what they mean in Ontario. 

As I have blogged before,  smart grid, expecialy distributed generation and smart meters, is more advanced in Ontario than most other jurisdictions in North America and comparable to Sweden and Denmark in the EU.  Ann Cavoukian provided important information about smart grid in Ontario.   Ontario has invested $1 billion in smart meter infrastructure and is the first jurisdiction in North America to equip every small business and home (except for condos and multi-unit buildings) with a smart meter.   That's 4,770,289 installed smart meters and 4,258,094 customers on time-of-use (TOU) billing. 

Nearly 5 million smart meters means a lot of data and much of it is personally identfiable information (PII), defined as any data that can be tied to an individual, directly or indirectly. Electric usage data tells people when you are using electric power at a granularity of 15 minute intervals and can be used for nefarious purposes.

Privacy = control

Ann Cavoukian's fundamental point is that privacy means that electric usage data belongs to the consumer, and that for the consumer it means being able to control who has access to their data.

When a utility collects electricity usage PPI data for billing purposes, the customer is right to expect that this primary purpose is the only use that the utility will make of the data.  If the utility wants to use the data for another purpose, it needs to ask the consumer for permission.

Privacy in the big data era

The challenge in this era of huge volumes of data that smart meters and other smart devices can generate is reconciling protecting the privacy of consumer energy usage data with  the importance to utilities of analytics which requires access to meter data.

Privacy by design

Ann Cavoukian's recommendation for doing this is what she calls Privacy by Design.  The first principle of which is minimizing the collection of PPI data and using it only for the primary purpose for which it was collected. 

De-identification

But there is a technique which enables the utility to use meter data, simply by aggregating the data so that it is de-identified and cannot be linked to an individual, for example, by aggregating all meter data by postal code and rejectjng any postal codes with less than three meters.  National statistical agencies have been doing this kind of things for years.  For example, Stats Canada does not report demographic data for census divisions  that have less than three respondents.  There are a variety of mathematical techniques for de-identifying data.

Ann Cavoukian said that the principles of Privacy by Design underlie not only Ontario's privacy laws, but also privacy laws in the U.S., E.U., New Zealand and Australia.

Consumer energy usage tracking software - who's the customer ?

Powermeter

Google PowerMeter was a software project of Google's philanthropy division, Google.org.   It was targetted on consumers and was designed to help consumers track their home electricity usage.  PowerMeter users could monitor their energy consumption online via an iGoogle widget, but it required that the utility had to agree to connect their smart meter data with Google.  Later Google started working with h/w manufacturers to develop gadgets to collect data directly from certain types of meters.  Google said that they did not intend to make money with the product, but wanted to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.   Google PowerMeter was launched on October 5, 2009, and retired on September 16, 2011, after about a two year run.

Hohm

Unlike Google Microsoft intended to make money on its energy management software Hohm through advertising.  LIke Google, Microsoft was interested in the consumer, not the utility, partly because they saw the consumer ultimately controlling demand and secondly because they assumed that consumer awareness of the Microsoft brand would attract users.  Microsoft announced that it was shutting down Microsoft Holm May 31, 2012, citing a “combination of weak customer demand (recession, energy efficiency not mainstream) and the lack of a coherent national energy policy [that] encourages solutions like Hohm.“

Several reasons that have been suggested for the failure of these two products from two of the largest software companies on the planet.   The market for energy management tools was still in a very early stage.   It required the consumer to opt-in, when the only successful utility applications required the consumer to opt-out.  Google.org isn't an energy company and really didn't know how to market to utilities. 

But the one that makes sense to me is the question of whether Google's or Microsoft's real customer should have been the utility or the consumer and whether utilities found the idea of a Microsoft or Google insinuating itself between the utility and its customers with access to electricity usage data attractive.

Opower

Opower is an example of a different approach to "behavioral energy efficiency".  Instead of doing an end-run around the utility,  Opower has focussed on the utility as their direct customer and has aimed at helping the utility make energy efficiency,  including Time-of-Use (TOU) or Peak-Time Rebates (PTR),  palatable or even attractive to the utility's consumer customer base.  As a result Opower has grown since their first customer in 2007 and now claims to be working with 75 utilities, including 8 of the10 largest in the U.S., with their energy monitoring software being used in 15 million homes globally.

Are plug-in electric vehicles beginning to takeoff in Southern California ?

At  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto today, David O. Jermain gave a fascinating presentation on the state of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) in Southern California and how they have affected the local utility, Southern California Edison (SCE). 

Utility folks have been of two minds about PEVs, whether to treat them as a massive electricity load growth opportunity, like air conditioners several decades ago, or as just another type of hair dryer.  (But PEVs are actually quite different from either air conditioners and hair dryers because hybrid PEVs like the Chevy Volt can generate as well as consume electricity and PEV's batteries could potentially supply electricity to external devices.)

PEVS in Southern California

David provided some very suggestive statistics about the deployment of PEVs in SCE's service area and the number of calls related to PEVs that the SCE call centre gets.

                       #PEVs

• 2010 1000
• 2011 1650 (65% increase)
• 2012 5200 (300% increase)

Two thirds of these PEVs charge at level 1 (120 V).  One third charge at level 2 (240 V).

Calls received by the SCE call centre suggest that at long last, PEVs may be beginning to take off.  Calls to the SCE call centre that relate to PEVs have increased by 350% over the last year.  The number of email inquiries relating to PEVs has increased by 360%.  The number of pageviews on the SCE web site that relate to PEVs has increased 14-fold.

         # pageviews

• 2011    1,600
• 2012 23,000

Since California probably leads the U.S. in the deployment of electric vehicles, what is happening there right now may be what the rest of North America will see in a few years.

How do PEVs affect the local distribution utility

Some people at utilities worry about whether the local distribution network would be able to handle a scenario in which everyone goes home after work and plugs in their PEV.   The concern is that the resulting surge or spike could overload transformers and worse.  There is also a concern that customers would require a lot of support from customer service folks.  SCE has developed a very elaborate workflow to integrate PEVs and PEV customers, but so far it really hasn't been necessary to use it..  So far PEVs haven't created problems for the local distribution grid and SCE's customer satisfaction statistics have not been negatively affected either.

But from the perspective of the market, PEVs present challenges.  David broke these down into issues relating to home fueling, public charging and how to handle fleets, for example,  the Department of Defence and companies like Frito-lay have bought a considerable number of PEVs.  The issues involve rates, submetering, the relationship with third party vendors who provide charging services, demand response, and so on.

Load shaping

One of the very interesting opportunities where PEVs could actually improve the reliability of the grid is in load shaping to balance intermittent energy sources like solar PV and wind.  Germany has been using a variety of techniques for years to sculpt load to balance wind and other intermittent energy sources.  A fascinating study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) looked at the possibility of using battery capacity in plug-in electric vehicles to mitigate imbalances from wind generation in the power grid.

Another interesting possibility is where PEVs could act as residential batteries during outages or to reduce costs where time of use pricing is available.

Why are utilities implementing analytics programs and how are they doing it ?

At  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto yesterday, several speakers explained what is driving utilities to invest in analytics programs, and gave some real world examples of how utilities are implementing analytics programs.

Why analytics ?

In a nutshell, as a number of speakers emphasized, the goal is to enable utilities to make decisions based on information derived from the increasing volume of reliable data that is available to utilities as a result of their smart grid activities, rather than "gut" intuition, which is what utilities had to rely on in the past because they had limited and out-of-date data.

Lloyd Tokerud of Hudson Energy referenced a seminal paper, an MIT Sloan Management Review "Big Data, Analytics, and the Path from Insight to Value" that found that top performing organizations are twice as likely to apply analytics to activities. 

The study also found that the biggest challenges in adopting analytics are managerial and cultural.  Lloyd pointed out that to enable an analytics prorgam to be successful, it is necessary to educate people on the use of data and to promote a data-driven culture rather than intuition.  The important benefit is that an anlytics program can enable the utility to make better decisions faster.

Lloyd also said that analytics requires people with different skills than traditional IT.   He called them  "purple people".  Purple people understand both IT (red) and the business (blue).

Guidelines for implementing an analytics program

Mary Rich, who was responsible for smart grid and analytics initiatives at Centerpoint Energy in Texas gave a very insightful overview of how Centerpoint implemented their first anaytics program subsequent to their rollout of smart meters and AMI.

Based on her experience at Centrepoint she made several points that are important for any utility planning to embark on an analytics program, 

First of all, implementing an analytics initiaive is not a departmental exercise, it has to be company-wide.  It needs top-level support and strong governance.  Without these it will either fail or drag on for years.  Seondly it is not cheap.  It requires new tools and new people.  The big payback will not be short term, but long term.  Creating a data-driven culture is a cultural transformation that requires breaking down traditional data silos in engineering, operations, GIS, and across the company. 

One of the most important objectives is ensuring that the data is accurate and comprehensive.  Most importantly there can be only one authoritative source for each piece of data.  Conflicting reports are not going to help management make decisions rapidly and even worse they will raise red flags with the regulator.

How did Centerpoint Energy implement an analytics program

At Centerpoint they created a team comprised of subject matter experts (SMEs) from all divisions of the company.  It was ensured that these people were relieved of some of their normal committments so they could devote quality time to the analytics initiative.

The team spent about a month and a half identifying areas which potentially could benefit significantly from the application of analytics.  They then winnowed these down to the top 25.

For each of these opportunities they wrote detailed use cases,  Mary emphasized that this was not easy.  It was time-consuming and often required external support people to help SMEs who were not familiar with writing use cases.

As a practical example of implementing a use case, ons of the uses cases related to what Centerpoint refers to as "diversion" and what others call non-revenue-generating, non-technical losses.  With analog meters Centerpoint had to rely on the meter readers to note signs of tamperring with a meter and to report a possible diversion problem to Centerpoint.  A crew would roll a truck and investigate,but in many cases it would turn out not to be a diversion probem.  Wth smart meters meter tampering can be detected auomatically., but it is an involved process because it is necessary to make sure that there isn't an outage or a crew working in the area, because these can trigger events that look like meter tampering.  The SME team working on the use case estimated that by using autmated techniques they could increase detection by 20%.

The reality was quite different. They found that their autmated algorithms were much more effective than expected, because they were able to identify real diversion events with 80% accuracy.  They found that the big business benefit was fewer truck rolls.  Mary strongly recommended that every utility should know the cost of a truck roll because reducing truck rolls is one of the most important areas where utiltiies can reduce costs, often dramatically.  Mary said that in Houston alone, they were able to eliminate 4.5 million truck rolls.

IEA projects that current energy trends will lead to a 3.6 °C rise in Earth's temperature

The World Energy Outlook 2012 just released by the IEA makes for fascinating reading.

Primary energy demand

First of all the IEA projects global energy demand to increases by over one‐third between now an 2035 driven by emerging economies. There are projected to be dramatic shifts in the energy mix as collective share of oil and coal drop by fifteen percentage points to 42%.  However, because of increased use of natural gas fossil fuels remain the principal source of energy worldwide.  Unconventional gas (shale gas) is projected to surposs coal in the primary energy supply mix by 2035.

The United States, which imports about 20% of its total energy supply, is projected to become nearly  self‐sufficient in net terms by 2035, primarily because of unconventional oil and gas, bioenergy, and improved fuel efficiency in transport.

Large‐scale investment in energy‐supply infrastructure is required.  It is estimated to amount to about $37 trillion over 2012‐2035, which is equivalent to 1.5% of global GDP.   Of this the oil and gas supply infrastructure will require $19 trillion; while $17 trillion will be required by the power sector for generation, transmission and distribution.

Electricity

Demand for electricity is projected to grow by over 70% to almost 32 000 TWh by 2035.  Over half of the increase is projected to come from China and India alone.  Generation from renewables globally is projected to grow  from 20% to 31% of total generation.

Water and energy

Global freshwater use for energy production in 2010 totalled 583 billion cubic metres (bcm), or some 15% of the world’s total water use. Of that, water consumption – the amount used but not returned to its source – was 66 bcm.  It is projected that water use will increase by 20% over 2010‐2035 (compared to 70%  more energy production), while consumption will increase by 85%.   These trends are the result of more efficient power plants with advanced cooling systems that reduce overall water use but increase consumption.

Energy efficiency

Several major energy‐consuming countries (China, United States, the European Union and Japan) have adopted new energy efficiency measures over the last year.  Implementation of these programs is projected to reduce global energy intensity (energy consumption per unit of GDP) by1.8% a year through to 2035.  This is a major improvement compared with only 0.5% per year over the last decade.

The buildings sector is singled out as having tremendous potential for energy efficiency gains (one third of the world's total energy consumption is by buildngs), but four‐fifths of this are not projected to be realized, primarily due to non-technical barriers.

Emissions

The IEA projects that energy‐related CO₂ emissions will rise from an estimated 31.2 Gt in 2011 to 37.0 Gt in 2035.  It is estimated that this would result in a long‐term average temperature increase of 3.6 °C at the Earth's surface.

The IEA has investigated an alternative scenario which if implemented could result in a lower estimated temperature rise at the Earth's surface.  The "Efficient World Scenario" assumes a more efficient allocation of resources which will increase global economic output by $18 trillion by 2035.  It requires an added investment of $11.8 trillion in efficient end‐use technologies.   This investment is projected to be  more than offset by a $17.5 trillion reduction in fuel bills and a $5.9 trillion cut to supply‐side investment.

In this scenario global primary energy demand growth is halved compared to the most probable scenario.  Energy intensity is assumed to improve at 2.6 times the rate over the last 25 years.  It is projected that oil demand will peak before 2020 and decline through 2035,  Coal demand in 2025 is projected to be lower than today. Natural gas demand is projected to continue to increase but at a lower rate than currently projected in the most probable scenario.

As a result, energy‐related CO₂ emissions are projected to peak before 2020 and decline to
30.5 Gt in 2035.  The IEA estimates that this would result in a long‐term average temperature increase of 3 °C.

Is the future of the grid direct current (DC) ?

In the late 1880's when electricity was just beginning to be introduced primarily for lighting and for running motors, there were two alternative incompatible technologies that were being promoted as the basis for the electic grid.  Direct current (DC), associated with Thomas Edison, took an early lead because the first practical electric motors used direct current. DC had a major disadvantage in that because there was no way to convert between high and low voltages, the latter typically used by the consumer, it could not be transmitted over long distances efficiently.  Alternating current, associated with Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse, had a significant advantage in that it was possible to transform between high and low voltages which made it possible to transmit electricity efficiently at high voltages over long distances.  Ultimately AC won out and is the basis for our current electric grid.

Direct current is everywhere

But this might be changing. Most of the digital equipment we typically use such as computers, gaming devices, televisions, control and sensing devices use DC.  If I remember, something like 40% of the power in the U.S. goes to chip devices, and this is expected to rise to 60% in the not very distant future.   Many renewable energy sources such as solar PV generate DC.  High voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission is significantly more efficient than AC transmission over long distances.  A significant breakthrough in high voltage DC technology was announced recently by ABB, which has developed a practical high voltage DC circuit breaker.  The fastest way to charge an electric vehicle is DC.

Solid state batteries

But perhaps the device that may dramatically change how consumers use power in the world of smart grid and distributed generation is the solid state transformer (SST).  The breakthrough that has enabled this to happen is silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET transistors that can handle high frequency, high voltage transformation.  Transformers using this technology are 1% the size and weight of a traditional iron core transformer.   They are capable of higher efficiencies than iron core, can handle different voltage inputs and both DC and AC, and support bi-directional power flow.  All of which makes them highly suitable for a distributed generation environment.

According to the market research report "Solid State Transformer Market - Global Forecast & Analysis (2012 - 2020)" published by MarketsandMarkets, the total solid state transformers applications market is expected to reach $ 5 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 82.3% from 2012 to 2020.