IEEE, industry players in race to help modernize smart grid

By Brian Fuller, Contributing Editor -- 6/17/2009
Electronic Business

Engineers and industry officials have started the clock ticking after a “historic” meeting in Santa Clara to begin to frame standards to help modernize the North American power grid, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century.

IEEE’s P2030 group, founded in March, met June 3 to 5 at Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters, gathering 150 people together to begin the work of identifying existing standards, as well as technology holes that need to be fixed to deliver on smart grid interoperability. It was one in a series of related national meetings in the past six weeks, from Washington to Santa Clara, from government to the private sector, to build frameworks and begin work around standards. Some $4.5 billion in federal stimulus money is targeted toward the smart grid construction, a figure that’s estimated to be at least a tenth what the overall industry investment will be.

“The big event here was bringing together the [IEEE] energy information and communication society groups into a unified group to do a unified project and cut across technologies,” said Dick DeBlasio, who is an IEEE standards board member and chair of the Standards Coordinating Committee (SCC) 21. “It was historical from that point of view.”

“Our goal coming into the meeting was to get the process started and people together and in active dialogue,” said Lorie Wigle, general manager of Intel’s Eco-Technology program. “There was a really good outcome in the willingness and desire for the companies to continue to talk between meetings to make forward progress.”

DeBlasio said the IEEE standards work during the next 12 to 18 months will focus on systems rather than “switches and relays.” At the conclusion of the meeting at Intel, three task forces were formed to tackle the next stage of standards work:

Task Force 1 (IEEE P2030 TF-1), Power Engineering Technology, lead by Sam Sciacca and Tom Prevost
Task Force 2 (IEEE P2030 TF-2), Information Technology, led by Bob Grow
Task Force 3 (IEEE P2030 TF-3), Communications Technology, led by Stefano Galli and Bob Heile.

Why now?

The need for a grid upgrade emerged starkly last summer, when oil prices soared and concern over the future of fossil fuel availability intensified. That coincided with popular understanding that the technology the industry’s brought to bear in computing, communications and consumer devices has obvious applicability in energy distribution, monitoring, and management.

The new “energy efficiency” mantra is generally defined as an ecosystem in which home appliances talk wirelessly to a device that lets consumers understand their power usage and control their consumption; in which utilities talk to homes to manage energy loads at times of peak demand; in which utilities better manage the distribution of new, “bursty” modes of power generation such as solar and wind.

Two things make electricity unique and a challenge for smart grid: Lack of flow control and electricity storage requirements.

“Change either of these and the grid delivery system will be transformed,” said DeBlasio, an engineer with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.

The IEEE work is being done in the context of a framework emerging at the federal level from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Shortly after a smart grid standards workshop April 28 to 29, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke hosted a Washington meeting with NIST and announced 16 standards that are essentially locked down—no debate necessary.

These include:
ANSI C12.19/MC1219-Revenue metering information model
DNP 3-Substation and feeder device automation
IEC 61850-Substation automation and protection
IEEE 1686-2007-Security for intelligent electronic devices
Open HAN-home area network device communication
ZigBee/Home Plug Smart Energy Profile-Home area device communications.

The near-term roadmap, according to NIST’s George W. Arnold, includes the initial phase between now and September in which existing consensus standards (including the 16 identified) are recognized; the establishment between now and 2010 of a public-private standards panel to provide recommendations for new and revised standards to be recognized by NIST; and testing and certification later in 2010.

While there are many existing standards and emerging technologies to work with, there are many unresolved issues.

Gaps in some of the standards—notably IEEE power engineering specs—need to be filled or updated, according to Arnold. These include IEEE 1547 (physical and electrical interconnections between utility and distributed generation), IEEE 1588 (precision clock synchronization), and IEEE C37 (standard electrical power system device function, originally published in 1928).

The third task force’s work (communications) may be more challenging, Arnold suggests, describing the communications infrastructure for the smart grid as “the wild west.” DeBlasio went him one further: “Communications is basically a two-way wire with a tin can at the end. There’s not a lot of advanced communications within the utilities.”

While most of mac/phy layer standards are IEEE’s, guidance will be needed on their application to the smart grid, and additional standards may be needed, as well, Arnold said.

Within the home, ZigBee seems to have emerged as the leading wireless communications factor, although powerline and other approaches haven’t been dismissed.

The interface between the home and the utility, though, may or may not emerge as a point of contention. While it’s generally up to individual utilities to choose their communications backhaul (because they own that customer relationship), there are a number of competing ways to update the technology, according to Lucian Ion, strategic marketing manager for smart grid and energy technology solutions at National Semiconductor. These include looking at cellular, WiMax or hybrid mesh/wired configurations—even FM radio, he added.

“There isn’t a clear standard from how you get it from the home. That’s more of an issue of a biz model of how each utility is able to secure a backhaul spot,” Ion said.

In addition, engineers and industry leaders will be examining how to handle emerging technologies that will add load to the grid—plug-in electric vehicles, for example, that charge in a garage overnight. That requires coordination among a number of standards bodies.

The next SCC 21 meeting is set for October, according to DeBlasio, who added that IBM has tentatively agreed to host that gathering in New York state.

The three task forces will meet several times between now and then, and DeBlasio said he has asked each task force to put together a straw man on which standards are solid, and which could be updated.