A Smarter Grid Beats the Heat

Author: Larry Fisher, Practice Director, Automotive, Energy and Emerging Technologies

Published: 30 Jul 2010

In early July, the Northeast of the United States experienced a heat wave. For four successive days, daytime temperatures rarely dipped below 90 degrees, and occasionally crept over 100. Even as journalists fell back on the old soft-news standard of trying to fry an egg on a hot sidewalk, a front-page article in The New York Times lauded the local utility, Consolidated Edison, for not wilting under the triple-digit heat despite “The greatest demand for power they had ever had to supply. The long red arrow in the utility company’s command center in Manhattan hovered at the threshold of uncharted territory – 13,141 megawatts consumed at one time – for most of the afternoon.”

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