SMART ENERGY INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
Smart energy industry overview and size.
Smart energy refers to a new area of interest where modern technologies are being used to serve essential as well as complex functions in the energy grid of the regions employing them. Everyday tasks executed courtesy of the smart energy industry include but are not limited to monitoring of power grids as well as automated maintenance schedules. The industry is quite pronounced in the United States and Europe, while trends reveal that the technology will soon become dominant in the Asia Pacific in the coming years (Cohn and Parker, 2017). However, the industry is still present in other regions such as Africa and South America as well. While no clear information exists about the size of the sector in terms of the annual sales made, it is however, evident that the industry is heavily invested in thus translating to an equal return. China alone invested $101 billion in 2015(Zho et al., 2017) in a bid for improving the smart grid technology. The United States, being a leader in this technology, has also invested heavily in similar research to further improve the level of the smart energy industry.
The industry covers an international geographic area. This is because different companies globally are implementing mart methods of operating their power grids.
Historical growths and trends,
The industry significantly flourished in the 21st century due to challenges experienced in power transmission and management in developed countries towards the end of the 20th century. There as a significant need of automating power supply, metering, maintenance and performing other necessary power transmission activities using state of the art functionalities (Clark and Ppavloski, 2010). This was aimed at meeting the ever-rising demanding needs of energy in such places.
The sales in the industry are expected to rise in the future. The industry is anticipated to be a multi-trillion industry based on the fact that it is being incorporated globally.
Smart Industry products.
The major products are smart meters, smart electrical appliances, design and implementation of renewable energy resources, and designing energy-efficient appliances. Target customers are national power grids, international organizations, local industries, and end-consumers of energy. At the moment, this is currently a concentrated company with few companies serving large markets. Such companies include GE Energy, Siemens, Itrons, S&T, and LG-Chem.