Pedro Marín is a confirmed speaker of TEDxEdges Algarve and he will talk about the electrical grid that today powers our houses and our industries. This huge infrastructure can be technologically complex but is conceptually simple. It relies on one way transmission of electricity from generation plants (nuclear and thermoelectric facilities, damns and other renewable energy sources) to consumers. The control mechanisms are limited, the redundancy to avoid outages is poor, and the meter readings are manual.
Today, new challenges arise: in Portugal utilities are obliged by law to buy electricity from micro-generators in households, environmental targets have been recently set in Copenhagen, liberalization of the electrical market obliges price reduction through waste elimination, and manual meter reading is becoming less viable, among other factors. Smart grids face these challenges by laying a data network parallel to the grid that bring together smart meters, substations, and macro and micro-generation. A fully deployed smart grid has an enormous potential in terms of becoming the largest data network in the world. For example, in Portugal there is roughly one million houses connected to the Internet and 6 times more connected to the electrical grid.
Pedro will talk about the pilot projects that are underway all around the globe and Portugal being no exception. InovGrid is EDP's project to smarten the national grid with an initial deployment of 50 thousand smart meters in 3 different portuguese cities.
Pedro holds a 5 years degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Telecommunications and Electronics branch, by the Technical University of Lisbon (2003). His final graduation project was done at the University of Aalborg with focus in advanced MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) scheduling techniques. Back to Lisbon, he pursued a master degree with again focus in MIMO, but this time applied to existing wireless technologies such as GPRS, HYPERLAN/2 and UMTS (2005).
His professional experience includes a one year internship in the Security Technology Group in Cisco's HQ, San Jose, California (2006); followed by a six months period in Novabase, and a 10 months training on several Cisco technologies in Cisco's European HQ, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2007). He has been working as a pre-sales systems engineer with focus in IP networks security in Cisco's Portuguese office ever since.
