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What We Mean When We Talk About the Grid

Our electric system is more than 100 years old, and although it has served us well, it needs upgrading. Our system, usually referred to as the grid, just isn’t flexible to accommodate energy from sources like wind and solar, and, at the same time, efficiently and reliably deliver energy to millions of user and hundreds of millions of devices and appliances.

Now, the challenge is to engineer a smarter grid that allows integration of renewable sources but also provides immediate feedback on system operations, outages, and end-use to optimize its performance. A smarter grid also make widescale blackouts a thing of the past by “seeing” problems and then isolating them before they spread throughout the region.