Don Leick, Product Management Director, Weather

The Distributech 2010 conference in Tampa is wrapping up today and it's been all about the SmartGrid. Distributech is the leading conference and exhibition for the operations side of electric utilities, and it's an interesting indicator of how SmartGrid seems to be dominating where the utility industry is headed. SmartGrid, the addition of intelligence into the distribution system, has many aspects. Two that were particularly dominant at Distributech were demand/response and distribution management systems. Telvent's DMS (distribution management system) was a rock star, with overflow crowds at the theatre demonstrations.

Weather will play in a number of different aspects in the SmartGrid - from distributed solar (residential solar panels that can destabilize the network), to more sophisticated outage management, to demand/response, and more. In demand/response, the need for higher resolution forecasts, spatially - such as to the substation level, and temporally - so that very near-term decisions about load shedding can be made based on accurate weather information. Telvent is working in all these areas with utility customers and business partners.

All in all, even in a somewhat depressed economic climate, the excitement at Distributech about SmartGrid was impressive.