Five Key Characteristics
Scalable
In the United States alone, there are 338 million meters in operation. If we are to bring our electricity grid into the digital era, each and every one of those meters and the millions of devices that connect to them must be smart. Devices need to measure and transmit data, act on incoming information and handle any number of innovative applications we haven’t yet even dreamed of. This level of scale will require a network that can accommodate the sum of information that will be generated by the smart grid. For example, if the 338 million meters already deployed in the United States digitally reported the most basic electricity use information every fifteen minutes, they would generate anywhere from 274 to 548 Gigabytes of information every day, enough to house five library floors wall to wall and floor to ceiling of academic journals. Many companies today claiming to provide smart grid solutions are deploying on the order of thousands of nodes. It’s unclear, however, if these networks can scale to support smart grid applications and data when deployments reach the hundreds of thousands or millions in numbers. Based on our experience, only the nation’s largest networks can handle the amount of data that will be generated from a fully functioning smart grid with millions of nodes.
Secure
As a critical infrastructure, the nation’s energy grid must be secure. Any failure in the electricity grid can have drastic consequences to health and human safety and cause serious economic losses. The North American Energy Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) levy heavy fines on utilities for not complying with their strict security standards. As we start waking up the electricity grid, each device becomes a communication device making the entire system more vulnerable to hackers and cyber terrorists who can access the system through any device connected to the network. This means any smart grid infrastructure has to have the highest possible level of security, such as IPSec at every point, to create a hardened security covering around the entire infrastructure. If the IP backbone is broken in any part of the network, as in some mesh network and proprietary solutions, the entire system is vulnerable to attack and utilities are exposed to severe regulatory action.
Strategic
Conventional wisdom tells us that smart grid deployments are blanket deployments. This is simply not the case. Blanket deployments pose myriad problems, including backlash from residents due to rising rates, inexperience with a particular geography or prohibitive cost. While there is a time and place for broad deployments, the initial stages of smart grid infrastructure will be strategic in nature. For example, many people who have solar panels installed on their roofs have no way to accurately measure the power their systems are producing or when electricity is fed back into the grid. There are large rural populations where a blanket deployment doesn’t make sense. Cities might want to strategically deploy smart grid infrastructure where health and safety are at risk, such as in the case for steam monitoring beneath city streets. Smart grid deployments mandated for government buildings and schools call for concentrated spot deployments. Businesses are hungrier than individuals for smart grid solutions because they stand to gain more from reducing energy use and managing backup generation more effectively. And from a utility point of view, commercial and industrial customers present high return on investment opportunities because they consume much more energy compared to residential customers. For example, Southern California Edison recently deployed smart meters over public wireless that represent just a quarter of one percent of the utility’s total meters yet account for 50 percent of its total revenues, which translates to more than $2 billion annually. These examples underscore how the smart grid will start taking shape where it is most needed and spread out from there, similar to the development of other networks such as the Internet. Another way utilities can be strategic with smart grid infrastructure is to leverage the country’s largest data networks to communicate information from any device to any other device on the network. With today’s rates, utilities pay an order of magnitude less than individuals for the same data network used by every person with a cell phone.
Simple
The electricity grid is complex enough so that adding smart grid infrastructure should be as simple and seamless as possible. A simple standards-based infrastructure will reduce the risk of developing a work force that is pigeonholed into a proprietary system or way of doing things. It also minimizes training and retention costs for employees to manage networks that need to last for at least 20 years. Most utilities are facing skilled worker shortages as Baby Boomers near retirement. With a dearth of R&D investment, utilities haven’t had the luxury of attracting the younger generation away from other options such as Internet or technology companies; however, the prospect of building out the nation’s smart grid infrastructure will be an attractive career pursuit. The new generation of workers is already trained on ubiquitous Internet and networking standards right out of college and use tools such as SMS and Web interfaces as part of their everyday existence. A simple smart grid infrastructure built on standards will greatly simplify training and deployment for the next generation of workers required to replace the estimated 45 percent of the utility workforce set to retire in the next seven years.1
Standard
A smart grid infrastructure can be scalable, secure, strategic and simple only if it’s built on true open standards. IP-based solutions that utilize public wireless networks and deliver grid intelligence to and from any device can easily scale to any size with minimal capital expenditures and be remotely upgraded to interface with new technologies as they are invented and introduced into the market. Anything less than a complete end-to-end IP solution will have limited application and unclear long-term costs and is becoming an increasingly risky investment, given the Obama administration’s emphasis on the use of solutions that use Internet-based protocols and standards as a condition for access to funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. By using public wireless networks in conjunction with industry standards like IP, IPsec, SNMP, IPv6, C12.22 and others, utilities will have better access to government funds, will incur less risk of being left behind from a technology standpoint and can completely avoid the risk of tying themselves to a particular supplier for the next twenty to thirty years.
1American Public Power Association (APPA). "Work Force Planning for the Public Power Utilities," 2005.
|
The SmartSynch Solution
 SmartMeters
TMS
Networks
Are your SmartMeters intelligent?
SmartSynch’s Smart Grid solutions equip all SmartMeters with
standards-based IP connectivity, enabling them to interface with other SmartMeters,
computers, and IP-enabled devices while capitalizing on the latest tools and technologies.
For more information,
call 1-888-362-1780.
|
