Time short to agree on smart-grid standards

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The first crack at vital smart-grid technical standards are due next year and some companies are already gumming up the works by pushing their own networking technology, according to the government official shepherding the process.

The need to hammer out interoperability standards is urgent and the task is extremely complex, said George Arnold, the national coordinator for smart-grid interoperability at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who gave a presentation at a seminar organized by the IEEE here on Saturday. There will eventually be hundreds of standards covering many areas, from cybersecurity to how meters talk to plug-in cars.

"We've never tried to anything of this magnitude before," Arnold said. "It's more complicated than the Internet and Internet standards have been evolving for over 20 years."

By contrast, smart-grid standards need to be agreed on quickly, with the next phase of a multiyear process due next to begin year. Technical interoperability through standards is supposed to safeguard various players, including consumers and utilities, against technical obsolescence and wasted investment. About $8.1 billion of federal, state, and industry money will be spent on upgrading the electricity grid in the next three years.

The smart grid touches a number of different devices in a home and on the electricity grid. There's a push to establish the technical blueprints and standards certification by late next year.

(Credit: Electric Power Research Institute)

In the case of smart appliances, Arnold said he is ruffling feathers by pushing networking companies to sort out a dizzying number of options.

With two-way meters installed in people's homes, a meter can send a message that higher electricity prices have gone into effect. For example, during a hot summer day when the air conditioning load on the grid is high, utilities may look to "shed load" and have some of its customers volunteer to lower their consumption.

An appliance, such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer, equipped with a chip should be able to receive the message from the meter and go into energy-saving mode. A "smart" appliance could receive the message and perhaps do a job in an hour instead of half an hour to use less power. That handshake between the appliance and meter needs to be standardized to make sure that consumers can buy products from different suppliers.

The problem is that there are multiple methods for passing energy-related information around the home and the companies involved are pushing their own technology, creating a "mess," said Arnold. There are wireless protocols Zigbee and Wi-Fi and at least six powerline communication protocols that use a home's wiring to move data.

"We're trying to accelerate the normal process and gravitate to a few market solutions, which normally takes years," he said after his talk. "Proponents of various communications standards all have a role but at the end of the day, there has to be some assurances for consumers."

Whirlpool last month announced that it would make 1 million "smart energy" clothes dryers by the end of 2011. That commitment, however, was contingent on standards being cooked by the end of 2010 and changes to regulations to reward consumers, appliances makers, and utilities to shave peak-time electricity use.

General Electric's appliance division, too, is making a complete line of demand response appliances.

But appliance manufacturers will be reluctant to support multiple protocols in their networking chips because that could raise the price of these grid-aware white goods.

Internet as a model
The situation with home-area networking is just one instance playing out among the dozens of technology providers, utilities, regulators, and standards bodies. Conflict over standards is common in the tech industry because betting on a failed standard can be costly. But the situation is more complex in the smart grid given the number of groups with a stake in the process.

NIST was given authority over smart-grid standards in 2007 and in September released a framework and roadmap for interoperability. (Click for PDF.) Arnold said that there has been strong industry support for the effort. But given that a number of smart-grid trials are already under way, NIST is focusing on accelerating the process, which will result in a testing and certification next year.

In some ways, NIST is looking at the Internet standards as a model for how the process should be operated. Last week, there was an event called Grid-Interop where a governing panel was created specifically to focus on interoperability.

"Over time this organization (called the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel) is going to become something like the Internet architecture board," said Arnold. "It's not being set up to develop standards. It's really being set up to develop the overall architecture and select which standards should be used."

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf is on the governing board of the panel, he added.

Home energy displays show you the juice (photos)

In its framework document, NIST identified eight priority areas where there is a lack of standards, which includes networking communications, security, and plug-in vehicles. But it is relying heavily on existing standards, including international standards, wherever it can to expedite the process, Arnold said.

That means coordinating among several standards organizations because the smart grid touches so many pieces of hardware and software. For example, to standardize plug-in electric vehicles requires coordination among upwards of 10 different organizations to cover national electric safety codes and standards for car batteries, networking, energy storage, and smart meters.

One of the principles that NIST is pursuing is that standards-based products should be backward-compatible since standards will continue to evolve for many years, Arnold said. He added that communications protocols over time should be based on the Internet Protocol.

[carlhage]

No it's not "more complicated than the Internet"-- it's less. But it's useful to look at why "the Internet" standards succeeded. They were not unique-- they were in competition with other standards developed in the traditional manner. Take email for example-- the Internet was "invented" by individual researchers or small groups that wrote up a proposal, the RFC-- request for comments, and often was accompanied by open-source software. Usually the RFCs were simple and easily implementable. (Al Gore never claimed to invent the internet-- he said he helped "create" it by funding it.) ARPA funded SRI to collect and disseminate the RFCs and coordinate the standards effort.<br /><br />Compare this with the ITU standards-- X.400 was a competitor to RFC822 (internet email). It was developed by big business that met to compose an extremely complex standard. The ITU makes money by selling the standard, so anyone who wanted to participate had to pay a large amount of money to purchase the copyrighted standard. Originally it was considered better-- after all it was developed by big corporations under the guise of an official standards organization-- not a bunch of free-wheeling university researchers. But RFC822 worked, really well, and X.400 didn't (it was too complex). The US government even mandated use of X.400 but "the Internet" way succeeded.<br /><br />During most of the development of the internet, software was not patentable, so there wasn't the problem of having to license almost any idea you can think of.<br /><br />The "web" was invented and became a success mainly because Tim Berners-Lee not only wrote a standard,<br />he made available a software library that allowed others to quickly make all the browsers-- Mozilla, Netscape, and MS-IE. Likewise, TCP/IP and internet software was freely available and open as part of Berkeley Unix (that lead to Sun Microsystems). The open-source software really set the standards, and guided how they were interpreted.<br /><br />To me, the story is how to develop standards. If the "internet way" is applied to smart grid standards could be developed quickly and successfully. If the traditional big-company groups battle out secret protocols with proprietary technology, we are headed for trouble.<br /><br />If the standards are open and accompanied by open-source software, we can be successful. The LLBL's OpenADR project is a methodology on the right track. The best thing would be to keep it that way, not let it get into the closed/complex standards process. It doesn't take big money to develop this technology-- it just needs the ability for smart people with no money to be able to participate in an open software and standards project.

[iptofar]

It's hard to see that this will actually save anything other than IT jobs. The cost of the equipment and added technology will likely never be made back which is of course why it will have to be gov't funded. Do i really want to add $50 of network equipment to every appliance i buy? High efficiency washers cost $20/year to operate. You will never make back that $50 cost over the life time of the washer. And there really is no savings except the reduction of peak load. And i can tell you, i really don't want the gov't in charge of my thermostat.

[carlhage]

No, you wouldn't want it if it added $20 to an appliance, except maybe an air conditioner or maybe refrigerator. A washer might use a timer so it could run overnight like a breadmaker-- it might add $1 to the price. For wireless communications, it could be added for $5-10, comparable to wireless temperature sensors available today. Though some startups may tout $300 displays and $50 controllers, they won't succeed, because they are too expensive.<br /><br />While a washer may be 500w a typical dryer might is 4000w, and a $20 add-on would pay for itself. This would also be useful to power companies for grid stabilization, since it's a large amount. In exchange for cutting your rate (say in half), the dryer could tell the power company that it has 4kW of load that could be reduced to 1kW on request for up to 30 min. If the power gets reduced, then clothes might take 1.25 hours instead of .75 hours, for example. Alternatively, the dryer could schedule the startup with the power company, arranging a near-term start time (delay up to 15 minutes) that gives the grid generators to adjust. Realistically, this would only save maybe $10-20/year, but over 10 years it would be a substantial savings.<br /><br />Yes, you are right-- the main purpose is reduction of peak load. But grid stabilization-- short term (1-15 minutes) adjustments in load is currently expensive-- one report puts the average cost at $.41/kWh. Instead of wasting power on idling reserve generators, it's cheaper and more efficient to control high-load appliances like an electric dryer.<br /><br />While people might like the convenience of flat-rate per kWh billing, the cost of electricity varies greatly based on time of day. So if you are a strict libertarian economist, then you would believe the price you pay should reflect the cost of providing that service. We would all benefit with lower energy cost with time-of-day billing, but it would indeed affect people's behavior.<br /><br />One simple add-on for a dryer would just be a price meter-- it could show how much it cost per load (or even per year), and could show what it would have been if done at another time (night or day). For example, for PG&#38;E summer baseline time-of-day billing, the dryer might show $.88 run summer afternoon, $.43 evening, $.30 night. If this household used 3x baseline, then cost would be $1.86 afternoon, $1.42 evening, $1.24 night. The big gain, of course is reducing total usage to get into the baseline rates. But with 2 loads/week (100/year) the $88 vs $30 cost is significant.

[HeavyJim]

Wonder why cnet has not reported on the hacked emails of the climate scientist? Bury it deep or ignore it?

[suyts2]

No doubt. It needs reported, why not here? It shows that many are fallacious. They've colluded and conspired to mislead the world's public. The few e-mails I've seen are very damning.

[billtoe]

Because you guys are employees of marketing firms that are employed by lobbyists that are employed by coal and gas interests, who are trying to create a fake grass-roots campaign against anything that will change the status quo.. Or you may just be conspiracy nuts. In either case, you are very annoying..

[suyts2]

And all of this to do what???? Does anybody consider cost and relevance anymore? Given the revelations of the e-mails of the CRU, we can be pretty sure that CO2 should no longer be a consideration in regards to limiting our electric capacity. Rendering all of the neat gizmos pretty much useless. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Further, given the Orwellian nature of many of these devices, we should have an overwhelmingly compelling reason to pursue this.

[richard993]

One step at a time! There is no need for a "smart" grid right now. All we need to do is ensure that the grid can handle peak loads during charging of electric vehicles and allow the meter to run backwards when a house is fitted with solar panels (there is no need to calculate energy drawn during peak/offpeak times to micro-watt accuracy because the electricity generated from the panels is a function of the suns position, sky conditions and solar panels, so peak and offpeak generation can be estimated to some degree of accuracy).<br /><br />The whole concept of "smart grid" is just another over inflated hype. There is no need to turn off appliances or reduce your electricity consumption to the nth degree... you can still leave your fridge running in the day and not have to reset the clock on the wall every time you come home. All you have to do IS MAKE SURE YOU ARE USING CLEAN ENERGY from any of the several viable means available.<br /><br />Go buy some solar panels and an electric car.<br /><br />Case closed... problem solved. End of story.

[meierlde]

Ah yes the joy of using the standards process to shaft your competitors. The OSI protocols which was supposed to dominate is a model of academic correctness but practical uselessness. This hits at one of the issues in IT which is really a conflict of interest. If you keep a standard simple you will likely be out of a job, so make it complex to keep your job. Actually all that is needed is to work on Thermostats (the major energy use in a house). For dryers and dishwashers add a delay timer. In general if you run them after 11 pm you will be at a low use time. It will be 30-40 years till smart appliances dominate the country given the turnover time of major appliances, and the fact that initially this will be on top end appliances only.