Dive Summary:

• A Pike Research study has concluded that nearly 150,000 substations will be automated or retrofitted from 2012 to 2020; the number will be more than 20,000 annually in 2020 alone.
• The reasons for the spike in modernization include stronger business cases and growing regulatory acceptance, as well the evolution toward more integrated systems.
• The increasingly intelligent gear embedded within the substations will play a critical role in this transformation toward mass retrofitting.

From the article:

“Key challenges such as outage management and recovery, increasingly complex system operations, and equipment management all suggest real growth in the coming years in the market for next-generation substation intelligence and data management,” says senior research director Bob Gohn. “While the trend toward infrastructure modernization will continue, growth will inevitably begin to decelerate somewhat over time as automation technologies reach a high level of installed base penetration.” ...