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.

IBM’s Interest Demonstrates IT's Tie to the Smart Grid

If IBM is interested in the electrical smart grid, you got to believe there’s a strong IT connection to smartly managing the efficient use of energy and the money to be made doing just that. In a posting on GreenTechMedia.com, Draw Clark, director of strategy, emerging markets, at IBM’s Venture Capital Group, is quoted as saying:

"Cleantech may be the only category [of venture investing] that is left relatively unscathed and [VCs] are looking to put new money into traditional IT type of companies and smart grid is exactly that."

As the article author Michael Kanellos points out, IBM's VC group doesn’t invest in startups, but meets with them to determine future trends and promising companies. Then, IBM figures out how best to tie its strategies and services with these emerging trends. As Kanellos writes:

If Big Blue is excited about something, there is a good chance that a channel for bringing a new idea to market is already being assembled.”

Kanellos writes that the IT angle better fits into the VC mold for building companies.

Unlike solar or biofuel companies, most smart grid outfits don't need to build huge factories. They develop software or networking devices for controlling various aspects of power transmission or consumption.

Who’s getting VC money to make the grid smarter: Trilliant, GridPoint, eMeter, Silver Spring Networks, Smart Synch, GainSpan, Grid Net and Onzo.

Today, the electrical grid isn’t too smart; its electrons mostly move in one direction. Making it a two-way highway is a challenge that will need lots of IT smarts.

Defining the Smart Grid

This blogs gives a lot of attention to the smart grid,
mostly because it shows the convergence of the electricity grid with smartness brought on by information technology.

Two recent web postings help define the smart grid:

From the Wired Blog Network: The Austin Smart Grid.

From The New York Times: On the Road to a Smart Grid.

Would Bell, Edison Recognize Their Inventions' Descendents?

My favorite quote of the week comes from Tom Raftery, a social-media blogger and business-tech manager from Ireland, speaking at a European conference last week:

“If you placed an iPhone in front of Alexander Graham Bell (below), he wouldn’t recognize what it was. But if you put an electricity grid in front of Thomas Edison (right), he’d recognize it straightaway; that’s because electricity grids haven’t changed much in the past 100 years.

“These grids need to change, they need to harness electricity in smarter ways, and they need to harness renewable energy from wind, solar and wave power. If the electricity grid went the way of the Internet in terms of interconnectivity, every householder and car holder could be a power broker.”

Clemson Profs Research Power Distribution Nets

Two Clemson University mathematical scientists are developing mathematical models of complex power-distribution networks to advance the understanding of monitoring in real time the electric grid so utilities can ensure uninterrupted service, improve distribution efficiency, save energy and reduce operating costs.

The challenges of modeling and system identification of the smart grid lies in the fact that the network is vast, complex, time-variant, non-linear and noisy,” “said one of the researchers, Taufiquar Khan (at right), who along with Irina Viktorova received a $285,000 research grant from tech provider Itron. “By noisy,” Khan said, “I mean the millions of light bulbs, computers, televisions, appliances, heaters and electrical motors going on and off contribute to the disorderly pattern of variations of voltage, current and impedance of the AC network. Therefore, we are working on mathematical solutions to optimize metering and communications.”

Also commenting in the Clemson statement is mathematics department chairman Robert Taylor: “The metering and communication data provide excellent opportunities for applied mathematical and statistical modeling and will lead to greater efficiencies in the energy industry.”

How Dumb is the Smart Grid?

There's been much talk of the smart grid, but compared with the Internet, the electricity network is pretty dumb.

It's a point lamented by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in remarks he made last week at a Natural Resources Defense Council event in New York. Schmidt said:

Now, I’m a computer scientists; I think about the Internet. I look at the electric grid and I say, why is the electric grid the same as it was in the 1960s? Because nobody cared. Nobody tried to build the grid that was flexible, scalable, decentralized, and had decentralized control to get on and off.

Here’s an example, you guys have all of the batteries sitting in your cars? What are they doing in your garage? Why can they not add to peak load, when peak load is needed? The utilities say that the highest cost of being a utility is not average load, but peak load, which is in the afternoons. Right, plug your car in, draw the battery down, charge it up at night, straight forward. Seems obvious right? You can’t do it because the computerization of the Internet, and so forth. seems obvious, right? The grid is not organized that way.

(Video of Eric Schmidt at the Natural Resources Defense
Council event , 33 minutes.)

Tom Friedman, in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, envisions a smart grid—or energy Internet, as he calls it—drawing electricity from car batteries while parked during peak periods, leaving enough power to get the driver home at night. To do that will require a lot of smart computing power. And, that means a lot of IT savvy professionals will be needed to make the electric grid as smart as the Internet. That should only help keep IT employment levels well above the rest of the workforce.

But most of the new green jobs won't be held by IT professionals. In its recently published Green Energy 2030 proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, Google estimates its plan could create 9 million net new jobs in the electrical efficiency and renewable energy sectors alone by 2030.


Source: Google
(Click on graphic to enlarge)

Job Estimates


Source: Google
(Click on graphic to enlarge)