Book excerpt: As power generation and demand develops, adopting and integrating communication and information technology to improve the reliability, efficiency and sustainability of power networks becomes essential. With the US Smart Grid market having doubled in size between 2009 and 2014, this concise book, written by a leading industry researcher, is very timely. This book is a handbook for advanced applications design and integration of new and future technologies into Smart Grids for researchers and engineers in academia and industry, looking to pull together disparate technologies and apply them for greater gains. The book covers Smart Grids as the midpoint in the generation, storage, transmission and distribution process through to database management, communication technologies, intelligent devices and synchronisation.