By Raj Vaswani

At the heart of this herculean task lies the concept of an intelligent network that can easily and rapidly absorb the myriad new devices and applications global innovation will create – in other words, a “smarter grid.” Like every great technology revolution before it, smart grids require a set of common technology standards to unleash their full potential. Standards enable interoperability, which in turn ensures that the broadest possible set of products reliably and securely work together. Customers benefit from greater choice because of heightened competition, aswell as higher-quality solutions, lower pricing, and reduced risk by avoiding vendor lock-in. Standards also open the market to new players and speed thepace of innovation for the benefit of consumers as a whole.

Networking technologies have existed for decades across many industries and are now widely deployed in a variety of enterprises. However, the smart grid network is unlike any other in the world. The controlled, easily accessible, indoor environment of traditional enterprise IT networks is dramatically different from that of the outdoor smart grid.

Among other things, these modern massive-scale energy networks need to:

·         Work all the time in unpredictable and harsh weather conditions, with equipment that must last in the field for up to 20years and can be difficult to physically access.

·         Be uniformly managed across tens of thousands of square miles, often on varied and topographically challenging terrain such as mountains or densely packed urban environments.

·         Support millions of end-points, and interoperate across a wide variety of devices, with unparalleled uptime. If a media delivery network fails, you might miss your favorite TV show; if a utility network fails, health and safety may be put at risk.

·         Be optimized for the machine-to-machine (M2M) communications of the future, allowing millions of devices to communicate directly with each other in peer-to-peer fashion and have the characteristics, such as low latency, needed to accommodate grid automation.

We have thus needed, and continue to need, to create a network platform unlike any that has existed before. Fortunately, the last few years of work on this problem have yielded a solution. Proven, real-world technologies and standards are fundamental to helping utilities deliver safe, reliable, environmentally conscious power in an economical fashion.