Billions of dollars will be spent every year for the next ten to twenty years as electricity systems worldwide are revolutionized. Tremendous growth will be driven in the short term by utility spend on advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), including large-scale installations of smart meters in North America, Western Europe and China. Collectively, utilities worldwide are expected to deploy over a billion smart meters by the end of 2025.
But smart meters will account for only 20% of utilities’ total spend on developing their smart grids. Major investments will also be needed in areas such as IT and communications infrastructure, intelligent distribution and substation automation, and equipment to support home energy management.
The migration to smart grids will create many opportunities for commercial enterprises to build businesses in the energy sector. “Smart grid deployment is going to be a global phenomenon,” says report co-author Catherine Viola. “The sheer scale of the investment is acting as a huge driver of innovation, and is creating a huge appetite to supply. Component, software and hardware vendors, systems integrators and services providers of many different types all have large new markets to target.”
Market suppliers will need to tailor their strategies for different geographic regions, and adopt different approaches depending upon their size, their legacy industry expertise and the specific part of the smart grid value chain they serve. “No new entrant is going to find an unpopulated market place. Competition is already fierce, and will continue to be fierce,” continues Viola.
Assessing the Smart Grid Opportunity provides an in-depth analysis of the opportunities available to companies looking to supply smart meter and smart grid equipment or services, and recommendations on the go-to-market strategies of different types of smart grid supplier.
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