A smarter grid has been requested – regulators have a complex decision to make
If the electricity to your home goes down, most electricity utilities don't know. The reason is that most hardware in between the electricity generation plant and your home is not communicating anything back to operators. Most hardware is of similar design to the times of Tesla and Edison. “Communication today with DER is really low-tech. It’s phone and it’s emails,” said Matthew Glasser, a director at Consolidated Edison. On the one hand, this is probably a net benefit for now as hackers would have long wreaked havoc...but this is changing - slowly though, as how to implement these technologies is…