[sllug-members]: OT: Smart Electric Power Grid needs Open Standards

[ehrbar]

Apologies for yet another off topic subject:

The Renewable Energy Focus Group of the State of Utah, which is open
to everyone, has weekly meetings every Wednesday 10-12 am at the Utah
Department of Environmental Quality, 168 North 1950 West, Room 101, in
SLC.  This Focus Group feeds into the governor's "Blue Ribbon Advisory
Committee on Climate Change" (BRAC) which helps the governor design a
renewable energy policy for Utah.

The meeting this Wednesday June 25 has on the agenda a presentation
about Smart Electric Grids.  Smart Grids integrate IT with the
electric power grid, and in this way bring the power grid into the
21st century.  Such an integration is discussed in conjunction with
renewable energy because the distributed generation of electricity
from wind and solar panels requires a more intelligent infrastructure
than the old-fashioned one-way electric net.  Renewable energy is also
a more democratic energy supplied by many individual small suppliers.

At the end of this email is a list of advantages of a smart grid, but
right now I'd like to explain why I am sending this email to SLLUG.  I
think that the BRAC should from the beginning also advocate that a
smart grid ought to be based on open standards.  Such open standards
exist, see

http://www.itron.com/pages/openway.asp

but other suppliers of the equipment use their own proprietary
communications.  If someone on this list, who is knowledgeable about
these issues, wanted to come to the meeting on Wednesday and explain
the advantages of open standards, I think this would make a
difference.  Or if you cannot make it, please email me off-list.

Hans G. Ehrbar


ADVANTAGES OF SMART GRIDS


Greater stability of the grid, better adjustment of supply to demand,
avoidance of brownouts and power outages.

Real time metering and power saving during peak times by the
development of intelligent appliances.  Here I have a question: are
open standards necessary so that everybody can program his or her own
intelligent power-gadget, or would that also work with closed
standards?


Labor savings by remote reading and switching of meters.  This
infrastructure can also be used for transmitting information from and
to gas and water meters.

Smart grids are better able to deal with the intermittent
distributed generation of solar and wind electric power.

Smart grids allow the use of individually owned plug-in hybrid
vehicles for storing energy (vehicle to grid), see
http://www.udel.edu/V2G/

Smart grids can naturally be combined with BPL (Broadband over Power Lines)
offerings to the consumer.

They are also useful for co-generation of power and heat etc.


WEB LINKS:


Article about smart grids:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/power_consumption/index.html


The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) http://my.epri.com/
promotes smart grids, but they don't like open source.  On
http://mydocs.epri.com/docs/SDRWeb/processguide/swurr.html they write:
"Open Source 3rd Party Software may not be distributed with
EPRI-developed Software."


Here is an article promoting open standards for smart grids or,
as they call it, AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure):
http://www.utilipoint.com/IssueAlert/article.asp?id=2707



Hans G. Ehrbar

Economics Department, University of Utah
Webmaster of the Utah Sustainability Portal
http://gaia.econ.utah.edu/