Unbelievable as it seems, the United States has just gotten serious about Smart Grids. Barring a failure of political or economic support, there’s a good chance that we’ll have a solid plan for upgrading our aging, fragile one-way power delivery grid by the end of this year. If the joint effort between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (
NIST) and the Electric Power Research Institute (
EPRI) succeeds, it will produce a blueprint for a new grid system that allows the US to cut its reliance on imported fossil fuels while reducing our national carbon footprint. When complete the Smart Grid spec will also provide our electricity supply with better security against malicious tampering, and fault containment capabilities that should make it more resistant to the massive cascading blackouts that have rocked North America several times in the last decade. While there are no major technical obstacles to deploying a Smart Grid, the sheer size of the project and the large number of stakeholders that must all agree on how it’s going to work makes it as complex and risky a task as the Apollo moon shot.
Part of the risk is lies in the unconventional process being used to develop the complex collection of requirements and specifications that will govern the Smart Grid’s construction and operation. Rather than develop the standard behind closed doors, NIST has invited all the stakeholders to take part and adopted many of the consensus-based decision-making processes that are used by industry to develop computer languages and networking protocols. The initial two-day
workshop I attended this week ( April 28 & 29, 2009) in Reston, Virginia was part of a three-phase
plan to define the standards and certification methodologies for Smart Grids and the equipment that will be used to build them. The event attracted over 500 representatives from electric utilities, research institutions, government agencies, electronics manufacturers, and others who all wanted to participate in developing the requirements that would be used to create the standard. Depending on their interests, the attendees joined one or more sub-committees, each of which has its own on-line
Wiki group that will be used to coordinate and document their efforts.
Much of the success of the standards process will depend on its participants’ willingness to put their own self-interest on hold while they concentrate on what it’s going to take to create the best possible standard. It’s tough to tell how many of the attendees were drawn to the workshop by the opportunity to help write the genetic code for one of the most ambitious pieces of public infrastructure ever built and how many were there simply to try to capture some of the $4.5B in matching funds that the government has allocated for the first phase of demonstration projects. I cannot speak for the entire organization, but the people in the sub-committees I sat in on appeared to be doing a pretty good job of keeping their companies’ needs from dominating the decision making process. While the process was not perfect, it was very impressive to watch executives from conservative mainstream power companies working hard to understand and support the technologies and business models that could, in a few years, completely upset the way their firms have done business for the better part of a century. Only time will tell whether the goodwill and good faith efforts will hold sway long enough to produce a working standard.
If all goes well, we’ll know how well the process has worked by the end of the summer when the workshops are scheduled to produce their final reports which will be used by the standards panel as a set of working requirements for the specification. Barring disasters, the plan is to deliver a preliminary specification that will enable the first pilot projects to begin to ramp up by early 2010. While there is certainly significant potential for the Smart Grid initiative to become another inefficient government money sink, the initial signs are that it is on target to radically change the way we produce and use power.
Comments? Questions? Thoughts on Smart Grids? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net or post your comments on our blog!
