The Smart Grid of the future will require significantly higher levels of information management and integration. This is needed to accommodate greater levels of demand side participation with smart buildings, demand response, distributed generation and storage, while supporting a reliable and economic operation of the distribution and transmission grid. The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) will provide the communications backbone to enable demand side participation and an enhanced level of distribution automation. The information management challenges, however, require capabilities to link consumers, distribution utilities, aggregators and energy market operators in a fully coordinated manner to achieve the economic and the reliability objectives of the Smart Grid. This is further complicated considering the invested capital and operational dependencies on the existing legacy systems and applications that may not be capable of supporting the Smart Grid objectives.

The emerging Web 2.0 technologies supporting secure integration of data and applications across the web for systems from different organizations and locations provide an ideal platform to address some of the information management challenges of the Smart Grid. New functional capabilities are created by implementing hybrid applications from selective data and services from diverse remote systems through enterprise mashup techniques. These hybrid applications provide incremental capabilities that close the functional and technical gaps in the existing systems with great savings in time-to-market and implementation costs. For example, to optimize operation of the distribution grid with a high penetration of distributed energy resources, utility personnel will require an application that combines weather forecasts, customer information and location from CIS, operating data from facility owner, scheduling data from aggregators, and telemetry load and voltage data from AMI. These data can be combined with geospatial mapping and power flow analysis to provide a visual display of the distribution grid’s current and forecasted operating conditions. Such information can be made available to the aggregators and facility operators to further optimize the grid operations.

Open Access Technology International, Inc. (OATI) is the leading provider of software products and services in North America for transmission grid scheduling and merchant power operations. OATI offers webSmartEnergyTM/SM, a complete suite of Web 2.0 products and services for Smart Grid and Green Power applications.

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