Stanford has a research project for the smart grid.

Bits & Watts is a major new Stanford/SLAC initiative focused on innovations for the 21st century electric grid—a new grid paradigm that is needed to incorporate large amounts of clean power and a growing number of distributed energy resources, while simultaneously enabling grid reliability, resilience, security, and affordability.

The initiative organizes its research into three thematic areas: grid core, grid edge, and grid data science. The initiative will advance technologies, policies, markets, regulations, and business models that work in concert between each thematic area.

The Bits & Watts Initiative seeks to:

• Offer and implement new research ideas and de-risk them for the electricity ecosystem
• Educate faculty, students, post-doctoral fellows, and staff about the holistic systems-focused approach to solving problems for the electricity ecosystem
• Offer holistic educational experience for current industry executives and other leaders
• Create open-source hardware and software solutions rapidly adopted by industry and policymakers
• Maintain flexibility amid uncertainty to exploit emerging technologies
• Be a trusted and unbiased convener
• Create platforms and protocols for sharing data with due consideration of privacy, security and confidentiality