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By Liz Enbysk

SGN Managing Editor

Echelon CEO Ron Sege laments that there are so many standards-setting bodies in the smart grid industry that effectively, we have no standards.

"If only," Sege says, "the smart grid industry could replicate how the Internet standards evolved." With the Internet, he says, 90% of the standards were handled by four entities.

Does Sege sound impatient? Maybe he is. He'd like to migrate from working on what he calls fairly pedestrian problems -- like how things plug together and what protocols we use to communicate on the grid – to the interesting problems. And he has a few of those in mind:

·         How do we analyze data coming off grids and turn it into useful information?

·         What kinds of visualization analytics can we apply?

·         How do we incorporate machine-to-machine learning?

·         How do we predict when and where the next outage or transformer overload will occur?

·         How do we squeeze every ounce of efficiency from our utility grids?

That said, Sege does expect to see a smaller and clearer set of standards emerge in the next few years.

Jason Cigarran, VP of Marketing at Comverge, agrees industry standards will be on the front burner. "In fact," he says, "we expect interoperability and standardization to be major themes over the coming years as utilities look to build systems that can quickly and efficiently help all classes of consumer optimize energy usage."

Utilities also want to drive down the total cost of ownership, notes Rodger Smith, SVP and General Manager of Utilities at Oracle. They are looking to integrated technology solutions to do that for them. "Therefore," he says, "open, standards-based IT systems that allow for easy integration and data sharing, and that optimize back office solutions, will be more and more attractive in years to come."

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Standards won't stand still

Lionel Chocron, General Manager for Cisco's Connected Energy Networks Business Unit, notes that advances in technology prompted new issues to arise. He says we saw that with cybersecurity as well as consumer data privacy and grid reliability. "I believe we will see that in the area of interoperability," Chocron says, "because siloed and proprietary approaches can seriously affect grid efficiency and reliability if implemented at-scale." Regulators and other stakeholders will need to take a close look at that, he says, because the current regulatory environment does not incentivize the right behaviors.

Interoperability and cybersecurity will be a key to smart grid success in the next few years in the view of Rob Wilhite, Global Director of Operations and Management Consulting at DNV KEMA. His take on it:

·         Need to ensure devices, once installed perform as expected in a large network, and with potentially frequent, remote firmware updates

·         Concerns are holding back some program investments today

·         NIST has done well to develop smart grid standards framework, but we need increased focus on testing and validation now

·         Promised benefits to regulators will greatly rely on this validation

Demand response is another technology that could use a standards assist, suggests Conrad Eustis, Director of Retail Technology Strategy at Portland General Electric. He believes demand response has great potential but suffers from institutional barriers.

Broad-based adoption of demand response, he says, will be contingent on smart appliances going mainstream. The problem that exists now is the cost of appliance upgrades is carried by manufacturers. The benefits initially flow to utilities, and later to the consumers.

Eustis suggests there are a number of possible solutions. "For instance, a consortium of utilities could collaborate and approach manufacturers with a viable business model and a common technical approach to communication and control." One example would be a standardized serial communication interface at the appliance, like ANSI/CEA 2045.

So there's still work to do, on many fronts.

"From the control room to the customer we see the influence of interoperability standards as a major trend in technology development," says Don Rickey, SVP of Schneider Electric's Infrastructure Business. "As these standards mature and are adopted they will expand their reach to adjacent segments, conflict with other standards for a while, and eventually harmonize to provide easy integration and allow developers to focus on application value versus infrastructure value."

More from SGN's The Next 10 Years series…

What we can (and can't) expect from regulators and policymakers

Maybe customer engagement isn't so dang important

Empowered "digital natives" become a force to reckon with

Silver Spring exec insists we need to go faster

Where we've come from (and how it shapes where we'll go next)