FUTURE TECH
Smart grid
Nearly 90 years since its formation, the national grid has been keeping pace with new technologies to ensure that it can serve the UK public’s ever-increasing hunger for electricity. But while balancing the grid has long been the job of humans in control rooms, those engineers are increasingly taking a back seat. In fact, artificial intelligence and smart grid technology are starting to unlock more capacity than ever before, with the National Grid’s SmartValves initiative unlocking an extra 1.5GW of capacity alone, enough to power 1 million homes with renewable energy. The interesting thing about SmartValves is that they can be operated either autonomously or by humans, which is leading many to think that one day our entire electricity grid could be run completely autonomously too. Gavin Doyle, a Senior Consultant on Technology Strategy at Cambridge Consultants, is one such person who believes that autonomous electricity grids could be in our future, as he explains.
106 Electrical Review | 150th Anniversary