The battle over tomorrow's electrical grid erupted here at
the Smart Grid Summit in Los Angeles Sept.
1 to 3 as telecommunications and Internet proponents clashed with traditional
utility pundits. The point of contention: the reuse of existing protocols,
namely the Session Initiation Protocol, in tomorrow's power grids.
That power grids need to evolve, nobody should question.
According to a study from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC),
the United States currently
produces 760 gigawatts of power while an additional 135
GW was needed in 2009, said John Yoon, vice president of marketing at
Control4, a provider of home automation platforms. Only
57 GW, however, were added in 2009. The bottom line is that less than 50
percent of the necessary energy build-out occurred.
The IT industry can't ignore the problem. Data centers
account today for 8 percent of total electrical consumption in the United
States, noted Richard Shockey, chair
of the SIP Forum technical working group. They require so much steady power
that expansion is becoming difficult. "Equinox can't even get a contract
to build out a new data center in the Silicon Valley because
it can't get a guarantee of 25 megawatts of power," Shockey said. "Everyone
says to go into Tennessee, but
there isn't enough fiber there."
The first step toward addressing the problem is conserving power,
and key to that effort is creating a new generation of electrical meters. The Automated
Metering Interface (AMI) will
provide consumers with real-time or near-real-time information on their
electricity consumption each month. Consumers, or potentially utility companies,
could then make decisions about the use of those devices, shutting down
electric appliances or, in the case of intelligent appliances, perhaps running them
at a lower setting.
But to deliver that information to the consumer, the meter
must exchange information, such as electricity rates, with the utility. Exactly
how the AMI will
gather that information is open to substantial disagreement. The National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is currently charged with
investigating the various approaches toward a new standard's framework for AMI, and
principal to that mission is interoperability. Again, however, there is substantial
disagreement over how to achieve interoperability.
Vertically integrated protocol stacks, similar to what
preceded the OSI model,
have been the dominant solutions in the past for utility providers. As new
architectures are considered, there's the risk that such methods will continue
to predominate, in the worst case, or at the very least yield the creation of a
new specification stack for communicating with devices. "SIP is not in the
road map for NIST," said Erich Gunther, chairman and CTO at
EnterNex, at the Smart Grid Summit. EnterNex is the company tasked by NIST to develop
the fundamental principles of interaction across the Smart Grid.
"What is the alternative?" retorted Shockey. "SIP
has 10 years of development built into it. XMPP could be extended, potentially,
but no other protocol set has the development of SIP," he argued. The
SmartGrid architecture doesn't have the understanding for an abstraction layer
between applications and the underlying protocol.
The adoption of SIP, while logical in a number of areas,
particularly given its ability to be extended to address a wide range of
environments, is also critical for telecom providers. "The worlds of telecom
and utilities are on a collision course," says Jon Arnold, co-founder of
Intelligent Communications Partners, organizers of the Summit. "It's
a bit like IBM and
Microsoft, where they will sometimes have to compete and sometimes work
together. Both communities are chasing the same customer; who will own the
customer is another matter."
With the adoption of SIP, telecom and Internet providers may
be able to deliver services across the utilities or leverage their
infrastructure in other ways. Deploying a closed environment or one that is
radically different from the SIP architecture may lock out telecom providers or
Internet entrepreneurs from the grid.
Still, there's a bigger question yet to be answered. "Smart
Grid is not about us yet. It's not about creating green opportunities. It's
about them, the utility providers," says Arnold. "It's
not like they're losing money. Ultimately you're allowing a monopoly to get a
complete stranglehold over the consumer. If they're monitoring electrical usage
and patterns and that's used for good then that's beneficial to consumers, but
then there's the Big Brother element. Could they one day determine which
appliances you will run or not? It could happen and we need to work to make
sure the necessary security and privacy controls are in place to prevent that
from occurring."
