Navigating the challenges of Internet of Things (IoT) for power and energy systems

Internet of Things (IoT) is the connection of the physical world to the Internet. It is fast emerging as the sustainable solution for providing access to affordable and clean energy all around the world. The utilities with IoT can have real-time feedback capabilities to better understand the customer needs and therefore make intelligent decisions to improve their service experience. With IoT, the electric power networks will be more secure, reliable, resilient and sustainable. IoT certainly opens the door to a lot of opportunities but it also has a few challenges associated with it. Some of these challenges include sensing, power management, cyber security, system complexity, and wireless and cloud connectivity. To grow and develop IoT, it becomes essential to have innovative sensing technology, a broad variety of wire and wireless standards, the lowest power solutions for any application, built-in hardware security technology, IoT solutions for everyone and not just experts, and an ecosystem of cloud partners to enable seamless integration. This paper presents the challenges and the recommended solutions associated with IoT.