Q&A: Why IP is the right choice for Smart Grid

The biggest network upgrade in the United States today is Smart Grid, a multibillion dollar modernization of the electricity grid that involves supporting real-time, two-way digital communications between electric utilities and their increasingly energy-conscious customers.

Will Smart Grid power IPv6?

Worth an estimated $20 billion this year, the Smart Grid market has attracted the attention of every major networking vendor, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Google. These vendors are pushing for Smart Grid to adopt common network standards rather than special-purpose protocols.

Network World interviewed George Arnold, National Coordinator for Smart Grid Interoperability with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, about where Internet standards and architecture will fit into the Smart Grid strategy. Here are excerpts from that conversation:

How significant of a data communications upgrade is Smart Grid?

The Smart Grid has to have a very robust communications infrastructure underlying it. If you think of the ISO stack, it covers all seven layers. The functionality ultimately is at the application layer to support things like consumer energy management, electrical vehicles and so forth.

One of the facts about the electricity grid in the United States is that it is highly fragmented: 80% is owned and operated by private companies, including about 3,100 electric utilities. This is not like the AT&T network of old where you have one national infrastructure. It's really a system of systems. That's where standards play a very important role because they provide a common set of network protocols that can run end-to-end over a variety of underlying physical and link layer technologies.

The part [of Smart Grid] that most users would see is at the distribution level, where you have a smart meter that is your building's interface into the grid. With Smart Grid, you have the ability for a smart metering infrastructure to send near real-time measurements of your energy usage and also to be able to signal when there are overload conditions on the grid and there needs to be some demand response to adjust the load.

As you get into the heart of the grid, where you have bulk power generation plants and the need to have real-time controls for SCADA systems…these are very different communications requirements. Reliability and security are key, but there's also the question of quality of service attributes such as latency. You need to close a relay in milliseconds. That is a very different environment than gathering electricity usage information from a resident every 15 minutes.

Can you characterize the progress NIST has made with its Smart Grid standards project?

I come from the telecom industry. One thing I like to do is compare what we are doing to next-generation standards in telecom. You're familiar with NGN, the Next Generation Networks standards [developed by the ITU]. That was about a five-year process. The Smart Grid is a much more complex infrastructure than the NGN. The development of standards for the full vision of the Smart Grid is going to be a multi-year effort. But in some sense it will be never-ending because the requirements will evolve and the technology will evolve. Where we are today is that the deployment of some aspects of Smart Grid is racing way ahead of the standards. Much of the investment is going into the metering infrastructure. While there are standards, they are pretty loose. There's a tremendous sense of urgency to get them tightened up.