An electricity grid provides power for processing plants.

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It also facilitates the many other currency features that are so important to users, but not to governments, such as unrestricted person-to-person payments, user-defined anonymity and untraceability, near-immediate bearer settlement, transaction irreversibility, reliable store of value, multi-grid capable, and decentralized processing.

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Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.

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More importantly, the subsea smart grid set the stage for large-scale subsea processing, which would reduce the costs of developing deep-sea fields dramatically.

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Grid computing attempts to connect up the islands of processing power and data in the world's universities and to standardise ways of interrogating data and calling on huge amounts of computer power.

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Altair Nanotechnologies is working with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and the University of Hawaii to supply a 2 megawatt energy storage system to maintain grid stability, all using its nano-scale processing technology that it says provides rapid charging.

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The subsea power grid encompass pumps and compressors and large variable speed drives to transport the oil and gas from the wellhead to a processing facility.

FORBES: World's First Subsea Smart Grid Changes Offshore Oil and Gas Game