SMARTER STRATEGIES

Smart Grids: The Battleground of Tomorrow's Internet

Dave Greenfield | Date: 09-03-09 | Comments

Electrical grids need to evolve, but there's much debate over how. Representatives of telecoms, Internet providers and utilities argue out how best to monitor and conserve power use at the Smart Grid Summit in Los Angeles.

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."