About my paper:  the smart grid and its capacity for development and security

Hello, everyone!  Today I would like to tell you about my research paper, which I wrote about the smart grid and its development, as well as major concerns regarding its security and ethics.  I approached this paper through the lens of sustainability due to the smart grid's capacity for sustainable and efficient energy generation and transfer.

The process by which I conducted research for this paper was intriguing because I initially was more interested in another topic.  I thought I wanted to do my paper on critical infrastructure and cyberwarfare/cybersecurity, but I found that the smart grid was a much more optimistic and open-ended topic that I could have more fun exploring.

First, I had to research and discover what the smart grid is, which was relatively easy, considering the large volume of information available on the topic, much of which comes from official government sources.  While some academic papers were hard for me to understand, given the fact that my background is not in computing or information technology, I was still able to obtain all necessary information.  In short, much of what we know about the smart grid and its prospects for the future lie in the fact that it is still very much developing, all of the time, so the research we do now must be very intentional in order to inform the smart grid's future development.

There are, as with any facet of information technology, concerns regarding security and ethics.  For the smart grid in particular, these include the potential for widespread outages which leave people without essential services and malicious and harmful code being written into its component parts.  These issues must be considered in the smart grid's future development in order to ensure that it is used as safely and effectively as possible.