This month’s Smart Grid Index (SGI) results show that overall Smart Grid sentiment edged up slightly in January. Utility sentiment increased for the second month in row, up by 4 percentage points in January. Over the next 12 months, forty-one percent of respondents indicated that North America represented the best opportunity for utility related information and communication technologies (ICTs). Almost half of the vendors surveyed closed a new deal last month, while 61% of utilities expect to submit new Smart Grid proposals for budget approval over the next 12 months. Utilities surveyed said that their biggest concern in deploying Smart Grid technologies was the integration of systems or networks that used to be silos (55%).

This study was conducted by Zpryme and FierceSmartGrid by surveying 212 Smart Grid executives from January 3rd to January 15th of 2013. The survey was conducted online. Please note that percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. Three groups were used to inspect for differences: vendors (61% of sample), utilities (15% of sample), and total sample. The data are presented in figures 1 through 10 in this report.

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