Green Vs. Safe IT?

One of the more intriguing tradeoffs with information security is green IT, says Robert Brammer, Northrop Grumman Information Systems vice president of advance technology. Check out my interview at GovInfoSecurity.com: Facing Tradeoffs to Secure IT Systems.

2009: The Year of the Smart Grid?

Smart grids and related technologies ranked fourth on a list of 17 green sectors venture capitalists invested in last quarter.

"Look for 2009 to be the year of smart grid, energy storage and energy efficiency," says senior analyst Eric Wesoff in a statement issued with a report from Greentech Media that showed VCs invested $208.5 million in 11 deals.

Investments in seven green IT deals topped $37.3 million, making it eighth on the list. Solar topped the list with nearly $1.34 billion invested in 29 deals.

$30B Sought for High-Tech Jobs In Obama's Stimulus Package

A report to be released Wednesday calls on the Obama administration to earmark about $30 billion on high-tech jobs in its stimulus package that could reach $1 trillion.

The report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation—The Digital Road to Recovery: A Stimulus Plan to Create Jobs, Boost Productivity and Revitalize America—promises to provide “a detailed analysis and estimate of the short-term jobs impacts of spurring investment in three critical digital networks: broadband, the smart grid (making the electric distribution system intelligent) and health IT and outlines policy steps to spur this investment.” ITIF says:

As Congress considers a substantial stimulus package to get the economy moving, investing in new economy digital infrastructures will provide significant opportunities not just for short-term stimulus and job creation, but also longer term economic and social benefits.

In an interview with The New York Times, ITIF president Robert Atkinson says “there’s another category of stimulus you could call innovation or digital stimulus—‘stimovation,’ as a colleague has referred to it.” as the article states:

Although many economists believe that a stimulus package must be timely, targeted and temporary, Atkinson’s organization argues that a fourth adjective—transformative—may be the most important. Transformative stimulus investments, he said, lead to economic growth that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

Atkinson also says that providing $30 billion in stimulus money for high tech jobs would provide a wonderful chance to integrate innovative technologies at a faster pace than otherwise would be possible. The ITIF chief, via NYT:

“You’d have an economy and society within three to four years that would be a lot better than we have today, and you’d create a lot of jobs.”

How Brainy Should Smart Grid Be?

Not everyone thinks there should be a lot of intelligence in the smart electrical grid.

The CEO of electricity demand control systems provider Sequentric Energy Systems, Daniel Flohr, prefers a smart grid without too much in the way of brains. Citing Flohr, a posting on the site arstechnica.com says:

Utilities want things reliable, secure and cheap, and it's easier to get all of those by limiting the intelligence of the grid. For something like a hot water heater, all the utility needs to handle is a few bits of communication every year, which is sufficient to shut it off and reactivate it around usage peaks.

But CEO Adrian Tuck of consumer smart-metering system provider Tendril sees consumers benefiting from more intelligence in the system.

Tuck compared the current system, where consumers simply get a bill at the end of the month, to shopping in a supermarket without knowing the prices, then getting an un-itemized bill at the end of the month. Tendril leverages the more elaborate monitoring capabilities of its hardware to provide consumers with a more complete picture of their home's power usage. The utilities collect the data from devices for their own purposes but also make it available to consumers through the Tendril platform.

FERC Report Sees IT Smarts to Link Smart Meters, Smart Grid

Linking the electrical grids with smart electric meters in homes and businesses should create many job opportunities for IT professionals in the coming years.

Two trends in efficient energy management are converging. One involves advanced meters that monitor and manage electric use in homes and businesses. The other is advance response programs utilities offer that manage customer consumption of electricity in response to supply conditions.

According to a just-released report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, 2008 Assessment of Demand Response and Advanced Metering the ratio of advanced meters to all installed meters has reached 4.7% for the United States, a significant jump from the less than 1% in 2006. On the demand response side, 8% of energy consumers in the U.S. participate in some kind of demand response program and the potential demand response resource contribution from all such U.S. programs is nearly 41,000 megawatts, or 5.8%, of U.S. peak demand, according to the FERC report. This represents an increase of about 3,400 MW from the 2006 estimate.

The report suggests the need for IT know-how to expand smart grid and smart metering use:

One way to mitigate risks in planning AMI (advanced metering infrastructure, the technology for gathering and disseminating information at a utility meter) communications networks is to ensure interoperability. Interoperability allows seamless sharing of data and integration of functionality between digital electronic systems (e.g., computing networks, communications networks, computers, computer programs, advanced metering systems, etc).

The technological means of achieving interoperability is through standards for software, hardware, or firmware. Recognizing a need for standards that would enable interoperability, the U.S. Congress in EISA (Energy Independence and Security Act) 2007 directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish “protocols and model standards for information management to achieve interoperability of smart grid devices and systems.”

In the meantime, many utilities proceeding with AMI plans are doing so cautiously, relying to some extent on open standards to mitigate technological risk exposure or planning and budgeting for periodic technology upgrades to their advanced metering system over the life of their system.