On August 23-24, 2010, BGST hosted an "Experts meeting on Data Analytics and the Smart Energy Grid" that brought together scientists and engineers from major research universities, private industry representatives, with government officials to discuss the impact of large, complex, and distributed datasets and associated computational techniques on the future smart energy grid.  The meeting was co-hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

The experts’ meeting, “Shifting Power: Smart Energy Grid 2020”, explored three concurrent power “shifts”. First, the decision-making regarding energy choices (e.g., what kind of energy, peak v. non-peak usage, the consumer ‘selling’ energy back to the grid) that will shift from the power company to a dynamic relationship among the users, distributors and the companies generating power. Second, the increase in demand for energy is shifting from fossil fuels to a combination of fossil fuels and renewable forms of energy, and thus increasing the importance of “lifecycle” analysis to support investment decisions. (While true globally, this shift will be particularly significant for countries with maturing energy usage, such as China and India.) These first two shifts require a third: the transition from an operator-dependent grid to one that can think for itself. The SEG will have to get ‘smarter’ to manage the influx of these massive amounts of different kinds of data and data flows (e.g., distributed and streaming).