Untangling the Smart Grid: Technology, Markets and Law examines the development and integration of smart grid technologies within the context of the grid's existing technological, regulatory and market realities, providing engineers, students and interested readers with a well-rounded understanding on how the grid works, how its markets function and how it is regulated and shaped by the society that it serves.

As fuel prices and global average temperatures rise, modern societies face an industrial challenge of unprecedented scope-the modernization of the electricity grid-the world's most complex manmade system. Systems designed for the delivery of cheap, centralized power on demand must now be retrofitted to meet a new set of objectives. The next evolution of the grid must accommodate a set of distributed and renewable energy generation assets that share little technical commonality with the large generators on which the system was built. These systems must now account for the security of the grid to failures, malicious attacks and breaches into sensitive information storage.