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Smart Grid Standards Done Right By Joe Hughes Sep 11, 2008 - 1:00:30 PM
When you build a high-rise, you must first get the foundation right or it will collapse. When you are remaking the North America power grid -- once called “the most complex machine on earth” -- the same principle applies.
Yet the Smart Grid still has only part of its underpinnings in place. To get a handle on this crucial topic, we turned to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which has been at the forefront of industry-level architecture development since the 1980s. Here is Joe Hughes, Sr. Technical Manager, EPRI, Palo Alto, CA.
The recent surge in enthusiasm for the Smart Grid is fine… but if it is not implemented with discipline and cooperation it will struggle even to reach mediocrity.
This article is a first in a series on the foundations of a Smart Grid. Those foundations go by a variety of names: industry standards, functional requirements, best practices, business policies, and reference designs and implementations, to name a few. Together, they serve an important purpose -- they are the basis for a “plug-and-work” architecture.
You’ve probably heard of “plug-and-play” for computing and video gaming. But when it comes to the grid, we need equipment that plugs in and goes to work. More specifically, we need the standards and practices to integrate intelligent equipment across not just a network but across several industries. This is a tall order and one that is unprecedented on the scale that it is now envisioned. Those standards include the networking protocols as well as the “language” that will be used by the equipment.
In this first article, I’ll be honest about the benefits and the challenges of our current standards situation. Then I’ll propose a series of topics that, taken together, can help utilities reduce the risks and increase the benefits of a Smart Grid implementation.
The Benefits of Standards
Standards are all around us. Effective standards created robust markets for many of the products we depend on every day -- television, radio, fax, email, and Web browsing, for instance.
Likewise, only standards (and the applications they enable) can get us all the things we say we want from our electric power infrastructure. Demand response. Wind integration. Advanced metering. Wide-area monitoring. Standards are required to make these things available, and at a price we can afford.
All the major stakeholders stand to benefit:
The good news is that there has been a lot of work accomplished by the industry that directly applies. The term Smart Grid is new but the concept of advancing power delivery through embedded commuting and communications is not at all new. Many people have worked their careers on this topic and much has been gained to this point.
The Challenges of Standards
Our first challenge was getting the electric power industry to realize that standards were necessary to enable the future. The industry has been moving in this direction, but in fits and starts.
Put simply, today’s situation is confused and chaotic. Several standards in the works overlap with adjacent efforts. Some are formal de jure standards from established bodies. Others are attempts at de facto standards from vendors and their friends. What’s more, to be truly effective, the grid must also be prepared to interact with standards from other industries, such as industrial equipment, commercial buildings, heating,ventilation and air conditioning, home automation, home appliances, and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
In addition to standards, we also need an industry-level architecture to act as a set of “building codes” -- to show where integration needs to take place across standards and industries. That architecture needs to be further augmented with consistent industry-level policies for management and security. Today, a consistent set of policies that stretches across the smart grid landscape does not exist.
Standards Are Not the Whole Picture
Standards are important building blocks but standards alone will not get the job done. We need technical integration across different standards communities on an industrial scale. We will have to cooperate and compromise in unprecedented ways, across department and operation boundaries as well as across industries. .
Achieving a real Smart Grid has not been and will not be easy. The task is as complex as putting a person on the moon but with the added dimension of requiring collaboration not just by one but by several industries. The scope is global and the companies involved will number in the thousands. However, this infrastructure is as subtle as the foundation under a building and just as critical to the future of the energy system and even planet earth. We need advancements in energy efficiency and system integration to help the planet and the smart grid infrastructure will play a major role.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. We propose as a first step an open discussion of the key elements of the Smart Grid architecture. Here are some of the topics we will address with you in this article series:
Joe Hughes is Senior Technical Manager of EPRI Power Delivery. His background includes 25 years in energy industry research and standards development.
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