One of the keys to making the Smart Grid economically viable is developing standards for communication. Communication between devices and operators. Communication between operators and balancing authorities. Communication for the markets. The need for standards is driven by economics. Without standards, a tremendous amount of time and energy goes into “point-to-point” integrations of technologies. This time and energy is a waste, as this labor is better spent adding value elsewhere. Standards help, because a little effort spent up front in defining the standard, coupled with a little effort implementing and verifying the standard, allows redirecting this labor.
Congress has chartered the National Institute of Standards and Technology to foster standards for the Smart Grid. The NIST has formed the SGIP to drive this process. The SGIP is not a standards body itself. Instead, it examines relevant standards and suggests Smart Grid related improvements. The SGIP is working very hard to make sure that there is representation from most of the major industry segments involved in the Smart Grid. It is also very open in its process, and welcomes participation. The best place to get an overview of what the SGIP is up to is to look at its wiki site: http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/WebHome.
Lots of good technical information there. I personally find the Interoperability Framework and the Smart Grid Cyber Security Guidelines very useful background material for how the Smart Grid will ultimately work.
The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP)
Grid-Interop 2009
I had the opportunity to attend the Grid-Interop 2009 conference in Denver last week. It was eye-opening to see the state of development of the Smart Grid. I was there for only one day, and attended the tracks on Data Communications Technology & Communications Interoperability.
The first presenter, Bruce Renz from Renz Consulting, gave a presentation on Broadband over Power Lines, where they connected two stations 4.4 miles apart using BPL. BPL is promising as a way to connect power substations using existing powering, saving the expense of an alternate data channel. It was an excellent presentation, and I came away with two things. First, I was under the impression that BPL was much more developed than it was – this seemed like a state-of-the-art presentation, and it was presentation a single link over 4.4 miles. Second, will it work during a major fault, which is when one needs data connectivity the most?
The next presenters were all excellent, ranging from using the cable infrastructure for transmitting data from the home to the utilities (good idea, leverage existing infrastructure); to using low-power wireless to implement the Home Area Network (good idea, leverage existing technology and expertise); to incompatibilities between the needs of real-time, deterministic bandwidth for power system control and Internet Protocol implementation (controversial – there are ways to implement IP over deterministic networking technologies); to using IPv6 in the Smart Grid (good idea, though I’ve heard IPv6 is coming Real Soon Now for the past ten years).
In all, the sessions indicated some healthy debate about the best way to implement the Smart Grid. I am of the opinion that there will not be a single implementation technology, rather a number of technologies that will be applied for particular purposes. This will bring lots of innovation, market acceptance, and, yes some amount of confusion.
I also came away with the impression that the Smart Grid is much further from reality than I had initially thought – and I was already aware we were in the early stages of the Smart Grid. Also running through my mind is the cynical engineer question of whether the Smart Grid is just a bunch of hype…
During the afternoon last week were meetings of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), the NIST-sponsored activities for defining standards for the Smart Grid. I will report on these in my next post.
CCIA Smart Grid Series – Session 2: The Technology
On October 28, the CCIA held its second Smart Grid seminar. This session was specifically on implementation technology for the Smart Grid. This session was not quite as well attended as the last one, for two reasons. First, this seminar was focused on technology, which doesn’t have as broad an interest as “vision.” Second, the first major snowstorm of the season hit on the morning of the seminar. This is Denver, after all, and sometimes the weather impacts the best laid plans.
The session had a similar format to the last one, with a keynote speaker giving an overview of the topic, then people from local businesses and universities presenting on specific areas of interest, then a final panel discussion with questions from the moderator and from the audience. The participants this week were:
- Dave Markham, Lockheed Martin: keynote.
- Marcia Martin, Magpie Telecom Insiders.
- Dr. Frank Barnes: University of Colorado, Boulder.
- David Cohen: Infolocity.
- Rex O’Niel, Fagre and Benson: moderator.
Dave Markham led the presentations with a presentation on technical challenges to the Smart Grid. Mr. Markham made many interesting points. From an economics standpoint, there are two factors that are critical for the success of the Smart Grid. First, getting consumer participation is critical, as it will create pull for the utilities. Second, regulated pricing in the utilities creates a disincentive to invest in the Smart Grid. Consumer participation is critical here, as it will provide stimulus for the regulatory agencies to perhaps change the pricing models to encourage Smart Grid development.
Next up was Marcia Martin. Her main point was that a number of issues involved in the Smart Grid have already been solved in other spaces, such as IT. I agree wholeheartedly with this. Ms. Martin gave a specific example of managing alerts. It had been that the utilities were freaked out about how to manage the large number of alerts that Instrumenting the power grid would generate. This problem has been solved in the IT space by products such as HP’s OpenView. The utilities now realize this, and the discussion has changed to how to integrate these products into their organizations.
The next speaker was David Cohen. He discussed the need to have localized control in the grid for repetitive, fast, vital actions. He proposed the use of agents to achieve this, and pointed out that delegation of control from the utilities to local agents could be an issue.
Finally, Dr. Frank Barnes discussed utility-grade energy storage. There are two ways to do this today – pumped hydro, where power at off peak times is used to pump water up a grade to be used to generate power during peak times; and compressed air, where the off peak power is used to compress air.
During the Q&A session, someone asked who is going to do the systems engineering for the Smart Grid. At a large scale were the usual suspects – GE, Siemens, ABB, etc. Mr. Markham pointed out that there is beginning to be a grass roots activity, with commercial buildings and developers designing smaller, locally managed grids for their own use.
One theme that struck me through all these discussions was that “Microgrids,” or self-contained, manageable, islands of power could be used to address many of these issues.
Finally, the question of international activities in the Smart Grid came up. There is significant investment in the Smart Grid happening in Europe, for example. The general consensus was that the USA is on par technically, but Europe seems to have a longer view investment horizon.
Time is Money — Should I use a Subversion / Bugzilla hosting service?
Should you host your Subversion & Bugzilla services yourself, or go with a service provider?
If you have read my whitepaper, “Four Essential Tools for Software Development,” you will know that I am a big believer in tools for version management and defect tracking. I am in the process of starting up a distributed development project, involving individuals from a number of different organizations. In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I wanted to set up a Subversion repository and a Bugzilla database for the project. Because there were multiple organizations involved, I would have to host these utilities outside my firewall.
Though I have used both Subversion and Bugzilla extensively, I am not an expert at setting them up. I spent a day playing with setting them up, and found that Bugzilla was particularly finicky in its setup. I then tried to host these services with the hosting service that is hosting my website. This didn’t work, as they were not willing to either install the software or give me root access to do it myself. Nothing against the hosting service — this is not their business, and they didn’t want change their hosting policies to suit just a single customer. They did offer me a dedicated server, which is way more than I need, for much more than I was willing to pay. Plus I would still have to install the software myself.
At the recommendation of a colleage, I investigated CVSDude.com, a hosting service specifically for software developers. They provide both Subversion and Bugzilla, plus other services as well. Click, click, click, and in five minutes I had an account. And the level of service I want is about $30 per month, significantly cheaper than a dedicated server. So I am going to go this route. Google-ing “subversion hosting” leads to a couple of other hosting companies offering similar services. I chose CVSDude because my colleague was already using it, and spoke well of its service.
I have two concerns with hosting my sources via a service provider. First, what if the company goes out of business? The corporate policy for CVSDude states that they will give me a 90 day window to recover my data. This is all well and good, but I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy… CVSDude also provides me the ability to download a dump of my repository every night onto my servers, which I take advantage of to keep my sources in my hot little hands. The second concern I have is with the Intellectual Property embodied in my source code. What happens if a rogue employee takes my sources and sells them to a competitor? Perhaps a bit farfetched, but I do get concerned about such things occasionally. CVSDude does have a reasonable Data Confidentiality Agreement, which states that they will take reasonable efforts to keep my data secret. Good enough for me for this particular project.
So, I am going with CVSDude for this project, and probably others in the future. It has been hassle free so far, and cheaper than I could put an external hosting solution together myself.
Free Resources for Starting My Business
As I mentioned earlier, I am in the process of starting my business. I have found an amazing number of free resources / extremely inexpensive resources to help me get started. Since the business is brand new, with little cash flow, the concept of “free / extremely inexpensive” is very attractive. Here are some that I’ve found so far. I live in Northern Colorado, so they are from that perspective, but I’m sure there are some similar agencies in your area.
I attended a free seminar on “How to be Your Own Boss” sponsored by the Larimer County Workforce Development Center. It was pretty basic, mostly focusing how to decide to become an entrepreneur. I’m long past *that* stage. It was useful to me, though, as it did give some ideas on how to find contract work (sologig.com, guru.com, elance.com, and Craig’s list).
Another seminar I attended recently was given by the local Small Business Development Center. The SBDC is a branch of the U.S. Small Business Administration that focuses on assistance to small business owners. The particular class I took was on accounting — not normally a hugely engrossing topic for me. This was an excellent class, though, because it focused on accounting from the small business owner’s perspective — federal taxes, state taxes, city taxes, payroll taxes, deductions, etc. It was mostly useful to help me understand where the tax landmines are, and how to navigate around them. This class was not free, as it cost me $40. It was well worth it.
As I find more interesting and inexpensive classes / seminars on starting a business, I’ll be sure to post them here.
CCIA Smart Grid Series — Session 1: The Vision
The Colorado Cleantech Industry Association hosted the first of a three part seminar series on the Smart Grid yesterday at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. I was in attendance, along with about 100 other interested people from the Colorado Front Range.
The seminar began with a presentation from Luke Clemente, General Manager of Smart Grid at GE Energy. It was a pretty standard presentation on the Smart Grid concept. One interesting part of this presentation was describing GE’s vision of a Zero Energy home, where an individual home owner can use residential photovoltaics, small wind, solar heating, etc. to become a net zero energy consumer. Of course using GE products… I do like the way GE is taking a consumer perspective on the Smart Grid, not just a utility perspective.
The seminar then shifted to a panel discussion, with the following members of the panel:
- Peter Edwards, Director, Fairfield and Woods, PC (Moderator)
- Dick DeBlasio, Laboratory Program Manager — Distributed Energy, NREL
- Tom Enwall, President & COO, Tendril Networks, Inc.
- Carl Lawrence, CEO, Eetrex Incorporated (formerly Hybrids Plus, Inc.)
- John LoPorto, President and CEO, Powertagging Technologies, Inc.
Among a lot of interesting discussion, a few thoughts occured to me…
Powertagging Technologies has some interesting technology where they can embed tags into the power output from the generators. These tags are maintained across transformers and transmission lines. What this does is allows the power consumption end to identify where the power comes from. This becomes an enabling technology for a lot of interesting applications, such as thered power pricing, PHEV tracking, etc.
Tendril Networks collects information from smart devices in the consumers home or office, aggregates the usage information, and provides this information back to the utility. This triggered thoughts about the role of aggregrators in the Smart Grid, not just for information, but perhaps even for power from distributed generation or PHEV. Is this a new business segment?
All of these companies are located in Colorado, and the CCIA has almost 100 members. It is good to see what appears to be a healthy ecosystem for clean technology business in Colorado.
There was no representation from the utilities on the panel. The utilities are going to be a major player in the adoption of the Smart Grid, so not having any of them here made the discussion somewhat lopsided.
The CCIA is going to put on two more seminars in this series. The next one is going to be on Smart Grid technologies, and the final one on the Smart Grid from a policy perspective. I plan on attending both of these.
Hello world!
Hello. My name is Jerry Duggan, and I am starting a new phase of my professional life, and I would like to share it with you.
I am a professional Software Engineer. I had been working for the past twenty-four years at Hewlett-Packard in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. During this time at HP, I’ve done a lot of cool things, met a lot of great people, and traveled to a lot of exciting destinations. I’ve spent most of my time in Research and Development doing product development, with brief stints in Marketing here and there. Most recently (well, for the past decade or so), I have been working software to manage IT systems, specifically storage networks. In addition to product development on HP’s Storage Essentials, I spent a lot of time working with the Storage Networking Industry Alliance working on SMI-S, a standard model for storage management.
That was then… I have recently decided to move on and try something new. It turns out that Northern Colorado is a hotbed of Alternative Energy research. One particular area that is of interest to me is the Smart Grid, where the electric power infrastructure is being modernized to accommodate renewable energy and distributed electricity generation. I figure a lot of the problems that need to be addressed in the Smart Grid are similar to problems that have been addressed by IT management systems. So I should be able to take my background and leverage it to the Smart Grid.
Another new area for me is that I am starting my own business, providing my expertise in software development for hire. This is turning out to be quite an adventure in itself, starting a new business from scratch.
My plan is to blog about all of this — software development topics, Alternative Energy / Smart Grid topics, and starting a new business in Northern Colorado topics. If any of this is of interest to you, stay tuned and I will share my learnings with you. Or, if you have some insights on any of these topics, share them with me. I’m always interested in learning something new.
jpd