Merging power grids and Big Data into the Internet of Energy

GE Power seeks replacement for traditional linear model of energy delivery

You’ve heard of Big Data, self-driving cars, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

But what about the Internet of Energy?

GE Power’s turbines and generators supply 30 percent of the world’s electricity. Now, the company is working to harness our new era of information, as well as grid-based power generation and delivery systems, and merge them into data-driven energy distribution.

“We think of a world,” GE Power’s chief digital officer Ganesh Bell tells Forbes, “where every electron will have a data bit associated with it. We associate and track that data and optimize it, and suddenly from a linear model we have moved to a networked model.”

Pretty heady stuff, admittedly. But it essentially boils down to what GE Power calls an “operating system for the industrial internet.”

By linking data and electricity, GE Power hopes that new monitoring capabilities will lead to power optimization and predictive maintenance for critical infrastructure machinery.

“The electricity industry is still following a one-hundred-year-old model which our founder, Edison, helped to proliferate. It’s the generation of electrons in one source which are then transmitted in a one-way linear model,” Bell tells Forbes.

“That’s how it’s been for hundreds of years—but that whole infrastructure is now being tested and pushed every day.”

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