What Is Smart? Defining the Foundations and Metrics for a Smart Grid

The term smart is the most overused, undefined term in the industry.  In the past we have seen a number of projects labeled “smart” that turned out not to be.  A working definition of the term is long overdue, especially now that it has found its way into federal legislation.  Recently, other SGN authors have presented their vision of a Smart Grid (see links at the bottom).  Here’s my view.

To define what a Smart Grid is, we need to understand what it should be from its roots or foundation.   Many efforts to define the Smart Grid make the mistake of trying to develop a laundry list of applications.   While this can help to some extent, it can also distract from what a Smart Grid should be.  Applications are important, since it is in their execution that many of the benefits are manifest. However, applications are only part of the story.

In its essence, the core foundation of the Smart Grid is an enabling infrastructure that allows today’s needs to be met as well as providing a foundation for future applications that our grandchildren will be able to build upon.

When constructing a high rise building, an architect is employed to provide the overall form and function for the design.  The architect starts with a solid, well-engineered foundation and then designs the building to accommodate a variety of disciplines such as plumbing, electrical, telecommunications, as well as structural engineering.  In the end, the building supports a variety of businesses and functions in addition to integrating into the fabric of the external infrastructures that support and integrate with the building.

Well defined “open standards” for building components and well defined “interfaces” enable the architect to competitively procure many of the building components while some of the major structural systems must be engineered.  The building architect benefits from the maturity of several supporting disciplines that range from structural engineering to plumbing to the “blue printing” that documents the building and its systems. Similarly, the Smart Grid architect must also rely on the disciplines of systems engineering and complex systems engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, network and telecommunications engineering to name a few.

And like a high rise structure, the Smart Grid should be approached in a disciplined way and should be seen as an enabling system that provides a foundation and structure to support a variety of business and technical functions.

The analogy of the Smart Grid to a high rise structure breaks down, however.  The Smart Grid goes beyond constructing a single building and must encompass a distributed computing infrastructure to support multiple industries across International borders.

The Smart Grid technical foundations and open standards must be mature, integrated, and truly enabling or the Smart Grid will fail to meet its most fundamental charter: that of supporting future applications. These standards include the following:

• Networking protocols
• Application-level language and semantics
• System models
• Open standards specific to technical domains that must interoperate with power systems

In addition to the technical disciplines to specify, develop, design, procure, and manage systems, the Smart Grid components must be built on the infrastructure as correctly as possible.  Among the needed Smart Grid infrastructure metrics are the following:

Requirements are mature and valid:

• Industry policies and rules of governance are well developed, mature, and can be consistently applied across the industry.
• Requirements that are well developed by domain experts and well documented following mature systems-engineering disciplines.
• Requirements include support for not only the applications but are also well developed for the management of systems as well as security.

Well-developed standards are in place:

• Open stable and mature industry-level standards from recognized Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) are available.
• Standards are integrated and harmonized with complementing standards across the utility enterprise through the use of an industry architecture that documents key points of interoperability and interfaces. 
• The standards were thoroughly evaluated both from focused technical review as well as through the development of reference designs and implementations that were subsequently thoroughly tested.
• Standards are robust and can be extended as necessary to meet future requirements and applications as the needs arise.
• Standards conformance testing suites are thorough and are complemented with interoperability and performance testing suites.

Architecture and infrastructure have been validated by users and the larger domain:

• Architecture artifacts include well defined interfaces across industries external to the utility industry.  The architecture also uses up-to-date system-modeling tools to manage the documentation and complexity of the system.
• Active consortia known as standards “user groups” assist in defining how to apply the standard for utility applications as well as supporting standards conformance testing and quality assurance processes. 
• The research and development results are in, and they have resolved some of the lingering infrastructure issues. 

Architecture and infrastructure are mature and robust:

• The architecture is robust for supporting power engineering and mission critical systems through massively scaled well managed and secure networks of networks for 30 years.
• The infrastructure is mature enough to support hundreds of companies building products that not only interoperate but appropriately integrate into the management and security infrastructures.
• Workforces are educated and developed that can support all aspects of the lifecycle of Smart Grid systems.  University curricula cover degrees in “Complex Systems Architecture.”
• Equipment and components of the Smart Grid can be procured from well defined specifications that make use of mature architecture and requirements documents as well as systems models and associated graphics. 

These metrics represent a vision.  They are a tall order and will require us to further define both the methodology (engineering approaches) as well as the content (standards and associated technologies).

At its foundation, the Smart Grid needs to be an enabling system.  In the next issue, I will cover some of these metrics in more depth to get a more complete sense of where the industry is today in developing standards and architecture.  The good news is that substantial bodies of work can now be put to use in designs and plans for smart grid technologies.   Standards and efforts that have been underway for many years now address several of the points above.   

We need to keep in mind that fundamentally what the industry needs now is an architecture, which goes well beyond a list of standards, policies, and recommended practices.  A mature architecture effectively integrates the standards within and across their technical environments as well as with industry policies and governance.

Jesse Berst’s vision of the Smart Grid

Capgemini’s view of the Smart Grid