May 19 2009

It Takes a Standard

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Imagine how frustrating life would be if every electric utility operated with a different voltage or frequency, so they couldn't share power when needed and you had to buy a separate converter for every city you visited.

That's the sort of scenario that electric utilities, technology vendors and government agencies are trying to head off as this country prepares for a tidal wave of new investment in a smarter, high-tech electrical grid.

The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act charged the National Institute of Standards with overseeing work on Smart Grid standards.Today and tomorrow, NIST is holding its second major workshop to put this exceedingly complex and ambitious assignment on a super fast track. NIST's goal--with $10 million in new stimulus funding--is to publish an interim Smart Grid standards roadmap by this September. On Monday, the Departments of Commerce and Energy released the first 16 proposed standards.

Open standards allow devices, networks and other technologies to interoperate, or talk the same language, so buyers and sellers can take advantage of scale economies. In addition, technology standards help assure buyers that they won't be saddled with proprietary solutions that becomes obsolete if new competitors eclipse their vendors.

Every electricity consumer should be glad there are technology experts willing to put up with the tedious and time-consuming discussions necessary to create these standards.

Those experts have to be willing to participate in groups like the "IEEE 802.15 Smart Utility Networks (SUN) Task Group 4g" knowing that their stimulating job will be to "create a PHY amendment to 802.15.4" to facilitate "large scale process control applications . . . capable of supporting large, geographically diverse networks with minimal infrastructure," among other things.

They also need to keep track of the work of ASHRAE, IEC, IETF, EPRI, NEMA, ANSI, IOS, ITU, SAE and an alphabet soup of other organizations.

PG&E's Chris Knudsen, director of the utility's Technology Innovation Center and a veteran of various wireless communications standards efforts, is one of those dedicated (I won't say masochistic) souls. He and his team are involved in standards work relating to smart meter infrastructure, home area networks and automated demand response, among other priorities. He chairs the Open Smart Grid subcommittee that oversees technical work in the Utility Communications Architecture (UCA) international users group.

Open SG includes 10 utilities representing about 27 percent of U.S. meters. "It's a technically deep and engaged group," Knudsen says. "We are highly involved in the NIST process."

What NIST brings to the table, Knudsen says, is an ability to "provide focus and minimize fragmentation by putting a common process around this effort. They have us all looking at the same picture in a structured governance process. That's how you accelerate standards."

Knudsen notes that integrating all the necessary standards--which could number in the thousands, depending on how you count them--"is only the first step. You also need an industry compliance program to make sure everyone is implementing standards in the same way. Without a defined set of tests, engineers will do things a little differently and you won't get plug-and-play interoperability."

"Plug-and-play interoperatibility" is engineering-speak for the ability of customers to go down to Best Buy or Radio Shack and buy (for example) a programmable home energy management device that will work with any utility's smart meter and with smart appliances to limit electricity use when prices are high and shift demand instead to off-peak periods.

Such interoperability will also let electric cars plug seamlessly into smart outlets and charge only at off-peak times to avoid overloading the grid.

"All of this technology, stitched together, will fundamentally change the way utilities operate, deploy and utilize technology," Knudsen says. But what excites him most are the implications for energy users.

Open standards, Knudsen says, will help utilities and their vendors deliver "all sorts of new and innovative energy services including efficiency, hybrid electric vehicles, renewable power and distributed resources. Everything we are doing here is to drive energy efficiency and value to the customer."

When you put it that way, Smart Grid standards don't sound boring at all. Still, I'm glad it's Knudsen who attends all those NIST-sponsored standards meetings and not me.

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