There are growing appeals for smart grid technologies. A smart grid is an electricity network that can detect, react, and pro-actively respond to changes in demand and other issues. Smart grids can self-heal and empower electricity users to participate. In principle, communication infrastructure for the smart grid should meet time synchronization, reliability, latency, and data delivery criticality criteria, as well as support for multicast.

In this report, over 60,000 patent applications filed worldwide between 2011 and 2021 in the field of smart grid technologies were examined.