An Industrial Electronics Perspective

he power grid is a massive intercon-nected network used to deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers and has been a vital energy supply. To minimize the impact of cli-mate change while at the same time maintaining social prosperity, smart energy must be embraced to ensure a balanced economical growth and environmental sustainability. There-fore, in the last few years, the new concept of a smart grid (SG) became a critical enabler in the contempo-rary world and has attracted increas-ing attention of policy makers and engineers. This article introduces the main concepts and technological challenges of SGs and presents the authors ’ views on some required challenges and opportunities pre-sented to the IEEE Industrial Elec-tronics Society (IES) in this new and exciting frontier. Electricity and the Electric Grid Electricity became the subject of scientific interest in the late 17th century with the work of William Gil-bert. Since then, a number of great discoveries and technological devel-opments have been achieved. Th