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Smart Grid Command & Control: The Death of the Giant Brain in the Sky By Jesse Berst Mar 2, 2010 - 10:22:20 AM
A new white paper from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) marks an important milestone in the evolution of the Smart Grid. EPRI describes it as the move from Smart Grid command & control to inform & motivate. I describe it as the move from interactive to transactive.
As devices get more intelligent, the grid can move away from centralized control over each device. We won’t need a Giant Brain in the Sky capable of talking to and commanding millions of devices. Instead, we can get by with a central resource controller that keeps those smart devices informed about what is going and gives them incentives for the behavior it wants. Price signals might be one kind of incentive. Seeing that peak pricing was going into effect, a smart appliance might choose to throttle back until prices were lower.
In essence, these devices are performing small transactions. If we take this approach, as EPRI points out, the Smart Grid can move forward much more quickly. For one thing, it lets us innovate and improve without fear of obsolescence. Manufacturers can swap in a newer, better device at any time, as long as it can talk and transact with the system.
The EPRI white paper goes into details about the messaging and other standards needed to allow this kind of system. Many other organizations have been working on this same approach for at least a decade, including Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (see my historical postscript). But EPRI’s paper marks, in my view, the mainstreaming of the concept.
PS: I coined the term transactive back in the late 90s, to describe the progression media was making as it moved from print to TV to Internet to eCommerce (see image below). Hearing me keynote a technology conference, PNNL executive Steve Hauser realized that the nascent Smart Grid was heading for a similar evolution. In fact, scientists at the lab had already been working on ways to make HVAC controls transactive, so that they could "bid" for heating and cooling as they needed it; a technique that turns out to make the system much more efficient.
Since then, economist Lynne Kiesling has adopted and extended the term, as you can read in the links listed below. Please use the Talk Back form to link us to other discussions on this important topic.
You may also be interested in ...
A Smart Grid Is a Transactive Grid; Lynne Kiesling
Smart Policies for a Smart Grid: Enabling a Consumer-Oriented Transactive Network (PDF)
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