More 2012 perspectives, predictions

Last week, I made my own annual predictions about what will happen in the power industry in 2012. I summed it up with four items: More smart grid, more cautious consumers having growing pains, more consumer growing pains means fewer EVs on the road, and more government contraction pains means less renewables investment.

You can read my predictions here.

This week, I look to other industry insiders to give 2012 predictions with a little insider perspective.

Chris King of eMeter (now owned by Siemens) tells us they’ll be a lot of meter growth in South America, Easter Europe and other emerging markets with Brazil, Poland and Singapore leading the way. King also notes that prepayment will become a major topic and “Smart Grid 2.0 will become a reality,” meaning that some consumers who live where smart meters are already deployed in full will start seeing the whole smart grid package.

King also predicts that data analytics apps will be a popular item with leading utilities and, unlike my predictions, that EVs “will reach critical mass.”

Steve Ehrlich with Space-Time Insight touched on data volumes just like King, pushing analytics, again, as a big 2012 trend.

“Pulling yesterday’s data out of a data warehouse is not the answer,” he tells us. “Utilities not only need access to real-time data but, because getting to the root cause of problems is increasingly complex, they also need more sophisticated software to come up with answers.”

From today’s waste of data to tomorrow’s waste of power, King also sees the idling of renewables becoming a “significant problem” with “utilities paying millions to curtail wind power and, for the first time, solar power.” Unfortunately, the solutions of more power lines and time-based pricing are longer-term items, according to King.

IDC Energy Insights sees positives in renewables for 2012, however, including it in one of the technology areas they expect to grow this year. In fact, they forecast that solar PV installations in North America will grow by more than 25% just this year.

As 2012 advances, we’ll get to see just how smart meters, smart grid, EVs, renewables and data analytics progresses. Keep an eye out.