Funding Projects

Eager to tap into federal funding, utilities across the country are setting up a bevy of smart grid trials. Smart-metering projects are predominant, with 45,119,212 smart meters deployed across 38 regions in the United States, according to Coincident, which has released a beta of its online AMI/Smart Metering visualization tool. Currently, the tool does not cover a number of states, including New York. (AMI [advanced metering interface] is the emerging specification for tomorrow’s smart electrical meters capable of responding to control and requests from utilities.)

California is the “smartest” of the states tracked by Coincident, with 10,128,000 meters (79.01 percent of all residences). Connecticut has the fewest meters planned (3,000 meters representing .21 percent of residences), though as a percentage, Colorado is slightly lower (3,500 meters representing .17 percent of residences).

Within Canada, Ontario has the most planned meters—and the most as a percentage in North America: 4,3262,647 meters representing 91.33 percent of residences. British Columbia has the fewest smart meters planned, at just 80 (under .01 percent).

Oncor, a utility in Texas, has one of the more developed smart grid implementations: It deployed about 300,000 smart meters, a number that is expected to reach 700,000 by the end of the year, says spokesperson Carol Peters. When complete, the reach will cover about a third of the state of Texas. As of January 2010, customers who have advanced meters will be able to see their energy consumption on a Web portal in 15-minute intervals.

In New York, state regulators reviewed a $385 million plan by Consolidated Edison to deploy smart meters, sensors and other devices throughout the utility’s 94,000-mile network. Half of the funding would come from consumers, with the other half to come from federal stimulus funds through a Department of Energy grant. The equipment would be used to monitor power usage and prevent potential breakdowns, like the blackouts that crippled Washington Heights in 1999 and Long Island City in 2006.

Today, Con Edison is testing the smart grid program in a $6 million pilot program in Queens that covers about 1,500 customers. Consumers will be outfitted with advanced meters and plugs for hybrids, and solar panels will be installed on the roof of LaGuardia Community College as an experiment in green energy.

Standard Headaches

For all the positive movement in smart grids, there continues to be good reasons for IT professionals to be sceptical. Driven by investment capital and encouraged by President Obama, the utility industry has moved quickly to develop the necessary standards frameworks to enable product development. This push has led to backing known protocols, such as Zigbee—a low-power protocol specialized for sensor networks—potentially at the expense of newer, more sophisticated protocols.

“We have not given the academic and research community time to do some serious dialogue in the field,” says WINMEC’s Gadh. “If we standardized on the first analog cellular protocol in the early ’70s, there [would have been] no room for innovation. Then we wouldn’t have had the 3G and 4G innovation that we have now.”

What’s more, there’s good reason to believe that these standards won’t be fully based on Internet standards. In “Smart Grids: The Battleground of Tomorrow’s Internet” on www.smartertechnology.com, Erich Gunther, chairman and CTO of EnerNex, said at the Smart Grid Summit, “SIP is not in the road map for NIST.” (EnerNex is tasked by NIST to develop the fundamental principles of interaction across the smart grid.)

The SIP Forum’s Shockey retorted: “What is the alternative? SIP has 10 years of development built into it. XMPP [Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol] could be extended, potentially, but no other protocol set has the development of SIP.”

Why the utility industry may choose to develop its own standards is a matter of some speculation. It could simply be that the industry as a whole is looking for the best solution to address its specific needs. On the other hand, energy and telecommunication providers target the same customers. Could such a move be a preliminary attempt at protecting their customer base?

“The worlds of telecom and utilities are on a collision course,” says Jon Arnold, co-founder of Intelligent Communications Partners, organizer of the Smart Grid Summit. “It’s a bit like IBM and Microsoft, where they will sometimes compete and sometimes work together. Both communities are chasing the same customers; who will own those customers is another matter.”

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