Power grids weren't built for today's world. They were designed for a steady one-way flow of electricity from large power stations to homes and factories.
That world has gone. Solar panels, wind farms and batteries now feed power into the system from thousands of directions at once, and demand shifts by the minute.
Siemens has taken the decision to tackle this thorny morass head on.
The German engineering giant has struck up a global strategic alliance with the Electric Power Group (EPG), a Pasadena-based analytics specialist, to give grid operators a much sharper picture of what is actually happening on their networks.
Most utilities still lean heavily on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, better known by the acronym SCADA.
