Dive Brief:

• Electric utilities investing in the development of smart grids are finding themselves swamped by an unprecedented amount of data as more terabytes are showing up every day at utility data centers around the U.S.
• The Electric Power Research Institute recently surveyed utilities to find out what they are doing with the data, attendees at a smart grid conference in Chicago were told on Wednesday.
• The surge in data is being enabled by the installation of phasor monitoring units that collect voltage, current and digital measurements as often as 30 times per second on the grid. 

Dive Insight:

The state of electric utility IT networks is also an issue, as it is unsuited for the analysis of the large amounts of data now being collected. A new generation of IT infrastructure will need to be developed.