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.