Interim Smart Grid Roadmap is out

NIST has published the interim smart grid roadmap, a guide for standards development to encourage interoperability and innovation in the distribution and use of [electrical] energy. Some have been waiting for this eagerly, some waiting with trepidation, some have not been tracking it at all, and some have wondered why my head has been down so low for so long. In any case, I thought you would be interested.

http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/

http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/InterimSmartGridRoadmapNISTRestructure.pdf

A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. The roadmap foresees a distributed environment, not only for the generation and for the storage of energy, but for the operation and decision-making on the grid. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution to some issues on the grid; they could well make the system much less reliable.

It is time to begin the move toward collaborative energy. My smart building biases lead me to focus on the end nodes; the smart grid requires smart buildings. The Roadmap highlights the Energy Management Service (EMS) as the sole service in the end node (Industry, Commercial Building, and Home) that communicates with the grid for purposes of load shaping and load curtailment. Over time, the load shaping signal will become primarily economic. Economic signals lead to the business opportunities for innovation in buildings.

You can read more of my thoughts on the EMS and Collaborative Energy at:

http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2009/6/17/collaborative-energythe-smart-grid-and-the-end-node.html

Interoperability through standards will allow new market entrants. Traditional energy markets have not allowed easy entrance of new technologies and participants. Traditional process integration has reduced costs but has been a barrier to diversity of technology. Light, loose service interactions are the preferred approach as identified in the Roadmap.

These new interfaces require new standards, and the new standards work is already underway. The authors of the CEC specification OpenADR have brought it to OASIS as the Energy Interoperability TC, whose first meeting is next Monday. I anticipate a call for participation in the Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) TC by month end. EMIX is sometime summed up as price; those who come from financial trading systems would call it product definition.

I hope we can quickly create a WS-Calendar TC to build upon the excellent work of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium to create an XML standard for schedules. Schedules are at the heart of collaborative energy, and new market prices will be based around unambiguous exchange of schedules. It is my hope that we then incorporate the same schedule specification within oBIX.

http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2009/6/6/schedules-for-things-and-markets.html

The roadmap, even before publication, has spurred conversations about how to apply enterprise security to the surfaces of building systems. That work is just at the first napkin stage.

If you want to work on any of these standards, let me know. If you are thinking of joining an OASIS committee, let me introduce you to the right staff to get going quickly.

Of course, if you have any questions about the Roadmap, or how it may apply to you, please feel free to drop me a line, or give me a call.

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