Smart Grid Series, Part 4: How standards will shape the grid

Part 4 in a series on the smart grid market. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

With the plethora of partnerships, devices and new technologies that the smart grid calls for, the need for standards is real and urgent – so urgent that expediting the smart grid rollout is amongst the Obama administration’s top priorities.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was given the primary responsibility for developing a standards framework by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, as well as American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funding of $10 million for the determination of grid interoperability standards. NIST works with organizations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and GridWise Architecture Council to incorporate their input and accelerate the process.

NIST, and its member groups, are charged with the task of bringing together multiple industries, including power, security, technology, government, communications and equipment vendors under a common umbrella of interoperability. The organization has promised an initial description of smart grid architecture, priorities for interoperability standards including cyber-security and an initial set of standards to support implementation, as well as plans to meet the remaining standards needs, by this fall. Connected Planet spoke with John McDonald, General Manager of marketing for General Electric Energy T&D and a Fellow at the IEEE about the standards-setting process and why it’s so important for the success of the smart grid.

On why standards are vital: In general, with anything new like smart grids, standards are important because – suppliers that will commit resources to design equipment in a new market – leadership of those companies is leery to commit resources to design something that is not anchored into a technology that has some stability to it. Things change so quickly that leadership wonders if it’s a fad technology or if it will be around for awhile. If it’s based on an industry standard, it has much more assurance of longevity. It really helps get the products designed by suppliers and it helps from the user point of view of they can use products from different suppliers based on the same standards and they know they will interoperate.

On the glue that binds the grid: We are talking about bringing together power and energy in electric utilities and the second thing is the communications. With any automation that we do, we can have control center systems, master center stations like the nerve center, field equipment out where the information is that we need to gather, but what brings it all together is communications. It’s the glue. It’s the power and energy, communications and IT infrastructure. How do we manage the info and what kind of infrastructure do we need to extract the data, store the data and manage it, make sure it gets to right groups and people in the organization?

On how NIST breaks down the process: The first step was identifying what standards we currently have that we can leverage with respect to smart grid. They identified 16 standards that were published and the scope of those was everything from generation from power plants all the way to our homes for energy management. The first step was, what do we have existing that we should use? Second step was looking at the overall vision of smart grid to see gaps. Where do we need new standards to be developed? Second phase was awarded to Enernex. One part is looking at the gaps we have and which standards development organization should be involved in preparing the standards. NIST is the coordinator but other SDOs actually write the standards.

Second part is setting up a longer term steering co or panel that continues to fill the gap in standards and writing them and ongoing maintenance, and third part is the interoperability testing procedure. If you’ve developed a product that conforms to a standard, if I’m going to buy it, I want to make sure it’s correct. In the process of buying it, I’d ask you to have it independently tested and certified by another company certified to do that and then you get a certificate. It’s a good safeguard for the users when they buy it.

On pulling out all the stops: I’ve been writing standards for 25 years and leading these efforts. The typical time to write a standard is three to five years. It’s a huge consensus building effort. You can imagine getting a room of 35 industry experts to agree on anything is a challenge. The sense of urgency has come down from Secretary Chu and Secretary Locke, and those two are key in what we are doing because NIST is part of the Commerce Department, and Chu is heavily involved with smart grids. Both have come out several times publically and said we need to expedite this process and pull out all the stops. We had a couple of pilot efforts with IEEE and we tried to fast track a new standard. We were able to get the total time down to less than 18 months. It’s possible, but not easy.

On survival of the fittest: The standard that has the consensus and is approved really sets the market direction. Competing standards and particularly proprietary ones will have a tough time surviving. Suppliers, users, consultants will look to the standard approved written by the SDO as acceptable to the marketplace. Anything proprietary today would be difficult to survive. There is too much focus on open.

On why the IEEE stays hands off on infrastructure: With telcos, what are very important are the protocols we use and standard protocols. With manufacturers of equipment for smart gird systems, you have a control center, field equipment and communication between them. We have to be somewhat communication agnostic because the end customer, you don’t know what type of communication they may want to use between the equipment. We have to support wired and wireless. We have to support different wired and wireless technologies.

On keeping the consumer in mind: When you use those technologies, you want them to be standard, not proprietary implementation that is only supported or done by one supplier. Users if they buy communication equipment and they find that it’s very difficult to use or costly or not reliable or it doesn’t work well with other equipment, it’s not going to survive very long. Successful supplier communication equipment is adopted with standards that keep the user in mind with ease of use, very reliable design and interoperability with other vendors. Word of mouth is important. If some utilities buy something and have great pains with it, they will make others aware of it.