Smart Grid to Grow 21 Percent a Year to $17B in 5 Years

Tue May 26, 2009 1:17pm EDT

By Katie Fehrenbacher - Earth2Tech

Networking giant Cisco has said that the market for smart-grid communications will grow into a $20 billion a year opportunity as the infrastructure is built out over the next five years. Researchers at Specialists in Business Information (SBI) basically agree, and have issued a report that says the U.S. smart-grid market will grow to $17 billion per year by 2014 from its current size of $6 billion. That’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 21 percent through 2014 for technology that will provide better sensing and control systems and help integrate more renewable energy into the U.S. power supply.

This represents sizable growth and a pretty big market, but let’s put it in perspective with some of the other markets created through information technology:

* The worldwide market for home-networking products, like game consoles, TVs and set-top boxes, will rise to over $94 billion in 2010, from about $74 billion this year, according to ABI Research.
* The worldwide revenue from semiconductors was $255 billion in 2008, which was a decrease of $14.5 billion from 2007 revenue, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide spending on IT, which includes consumer and business spending on computing, IT services, telecom and software, is forecast to total $3.2 trillion in 2009, which is a 3.8 percent decline from $3.4 trillion in 2008, according to Gartner.
* The worldwide market for enterprise software is forecast to total $222.6 billion in 2009, which is basically flat from $221.9 billion last year, according to Gartner.