11.25.09Larsh Johnson, President and CTO, eMeter Corporation

Article Viewed 986 Times
3 Comments

The first part of this two-part article covered the Smart Grid Ready Framework, and an overview of some of its components. This week, we will cover the final three. The Smart Grid Ready Framework is a strategic application blueprint that helps ensure grid management implementations deliver business value as expected. The framework is defined by five components:

• Support for real-time grid management
• Support for process interoperability and data exchange within and between enterprises
• Support for Web-based consumer engagement
• Inclusion of tools to manage deployment, operation and maintenance of AMI, HAN, and other smart grid systems
• Designed to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) standards

My previous article provided an overview of the first two of the above components. Here are the final three.

3. Consumer Engagement

One of the key tenets of smart grid is to empower consumer interaction for optimal energy management. Consumer Engagement defines the system characteristics that educate, inform and encourage sustained, proactive behavior to optimize power demand and save energy. Early attempts to communicate with consumers about their energy consumption have come in the form of tips or energy analysis presented on individual monthly bills. However, these steps fail to effectively tie usage and behavior to cost or environmental impact in a meaningful manner that builds understanding or encourages conservation.

Consumer Engagement will leverage the Web as a focal point for engaging the consumer more deeply, and represent a critical next phase in Smart Grid deployment. To better encourage behavior changes, consumers need to be clearly and simply shown the connection between usage, cost and environmental impact. They must have immediate access to answers for their questions regarding their options to minimize/optimize their energy usage to reduce costs. There are six key requirements for consumer engagement:

• Real-time visibility of the relationship between usage, cost and environmental impact.
• Clear and simple, cross-platform access to power usage education, trusted tips and FAQs.
• Integrated promotion of conservation options with expert opinion and peer recommendations.
• Immediate notification of usage and cost changes to allow users to better manage their bills.
• Support for Web communities to encourage conservation and best practices.
• Aggregation and presentation of PUC and ratepayer reporting on cost reductions and load demand shift.

Presenting timely usage data allows consumers to associate the cost of their bill with their usage of individual appliances or heating/cooling systems. Time-of-use rate plans can be applied to show the savings benefits of behavior change. Real-time delivery of alerts allows users to respond appropriately to grid events such as peaks, rolling brownouts or extreme weather events, and the impact of actions can be linked on an individual, or community level. Peer comparison and advice from the local community and respected experts motivates changes in consumption patterns, which are supported by actionable information and reinforced with immediate feedback.

Users are familiar with and trust peer rating social tools such as eBay's user seller ratings, and tools such as these will be invaluable in encouraging trust in peers for recommendations. In addition, integrated communications with users across a wide variety of media including printed bills, mail, Web, mobile phone and community events are key to influencing behavior. A Consumer Engagement site should integrate all and become the focal point for consumer-utility collaboration to save energy.

4. Tools for Deployment of Smart Grid Devices

Industry-wide adoption of smart grid requires the successful deployment of many millions of intelligent meters, in-home devices, distribution grid sensors and controllers -- without disruption to energy supply, customer service or billing. For the industry as a whole, the cost, time and risk required to accomplish this is a material obstacle to achieving the vision. For the individual utility, deployment expense can add millions of dollars to an average project, and manual deployment can add years to the schedule.

Tools to optimize deployment logistics and automate provisioning of smart meter devices can dramatically reduce these costs and accelerate the rate at which AMI is brought online. Moreover, these tools offer the benefit of reducing or eliminating the risk of billing and customer service disruption. Following initial deployment, these benefits are extended to reduce ongoing maintenance overhead.

Tools should automate and control the end-to-end AMI deployment process in a real-time, closed-loop fashion, from planning and installation through provisioning and cutover. Validation of individual meter operation, data and the complete billing feed process should be supported -- as well as automated cutover after successful validation. The system should have provisions for exception handling and closed-loop integration with work management and other logistics to drive optimized problem resolution. Finally, off-the-shelf interfaces should exist to simplify system integration.

5. Adaptive, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

The evolution to smart grid will be a continuum of business process re-engineering (BPR) for the adopting utility. Adopters cannot afford to rewrite systems each time new regulations and requirements emerge, or when new technologies enter their smart grid community.

SOA is the systems foundation to support iterative BPR. For ongoing operations, it enables the real-time processing, interoperability and scalability for smart grid management. SOA removes dependencies that paralyze traditional monolithic business systems. With an SOA, application processes can be more easily coupled and decoupled, and required information flows freely within and across reengineered systems. Equally important, SOA environments can be extended with new capabilities without retrofit.

An effective SOA should break the hardwired connections between business process, data, applications and infrastructure to allow:

• Change in process and data flow between applications
• Integration of wholly new application function
• Integration of SOA-based solutions into non-SOA environments
• Incremental addition of processing capacity
• System fault tolerance if individual components fail

Although there are many specific instantiations of an SOA, all have common attributes:

Interfaces that insulate process from physical infrastructure: This provides a common way of expressing processes that operate across different systems. For example, with an SOA interface layer, one service can be implemented to perform device reads and "bound" to many device types. The service does not have to be re-created for each device type, or updated as infrastructure changes. Many solutions promote the importance of "SOA compliant" interfaces. Although these are a necessary component, by themselves they are insufficient to achieve the full benefit of SOA. Interface-only implementations merely wrap monolithic code in a more maintainable interface. Complete architectures go beyond this to support full process interoperability and re-engineering. They provide the ability to delegate service execution to multiple applications and to manage that delegation in the context of an end-to-end process. They allow changes to these flows without re-tooling in-place applications.

To accomplish this, more is required:

Application-independent business process rules: Providing a mechanism to create and manage business rules that is separate or "abstracted" from application logic enables change in process flow within and between systems without having to rewrite applications each time a business process changes. In addition, process interoperability can be supported. Requests for service can be published to applications and replies fielded to kick off other processes according to specified rules.

Application-independent data exchange: A common repository where data and events are collected and managed can act as the central hub to provide a consistent view of data between applications. The repository performs data transformation and mapping services to ensure the common data representation can meet the unique format requirements of each application served. In addition, a complete history must be maintained to provide an audit trail for original source data versions, changes and event processing.

Real-time messaging for inter-process communication: Provides a common standards-based backbone for real-time information flow between systems. This component is essential to enabling interoperability as well as scaling to manage the high data and event traffic smart grid management will drive. The messaging platform should be independent from the application layer it supports, enabling loose coupling (and re-coupling) of applications. To guarantee message transfer for the full spectrum of data interchange, it should support synchronous and asynchronous messaging, and request/reply or publish/subscribe interactions. Finally, it should be implemented in a distributed fashion to avoid introduction of a single point of failure and enable modular addition of systems and network capacity.

Recognizing the majority of utilities' in-place systems are not today SOA-compliant, it is critical that the introduction of SOA systems allows for coexistence. Interfaces to legacy systems should support interactions mandated by a wide range of legacy application and data models. This includes translating data into types and formats that legacy systems can use without having to make extensive changes to the legacy systems. For example, filtering and converting outage alarms to look like phone messages that legacy outage management systems are designed to handle; and delivering these via the right interface.

Conclusion

When implementing smart grid management systems, successful utilities will first seek to achieve greater flexibility and efficiency for existing, discrete operations. Typically this involves automating existing monthly metering processes with AMI infrastructure. This will lay the foundation for more real-time operations and integration of end-to-end processes -- within and outside the enterprise. But before this effort is complete, they will be required to integrate entirely new advanced applications, and evolve in step with a fluid regulatory environment. Building to a Smart Grid Ready Framework can ensure required capabilities are supported and systems evolution can take place seamlessly, without disruption to existing operations and customer service.

We know you have something to say!

There is an immediate need for articles on the hot topics in the Power Industry! EnergyPulse, like no other publication, also provides a means for our readers to immediately interact with experts like you.

Contribute Today!

Please view our Author Guidelines and send submissions to the editor.

Reader's Comments

Date	Comment
bill payne 12.1.09	Incresed use of Internet and computers consumes more power. These systems will be implemented in electricity-consuming scripting languages. Google 'scripting languages pollute' From: bpayne37@comcast.net To: "Vaclav Smil" Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2009 12:42:21 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain Subject: W/m2 vs kWh Hello professor Smil, Are the W/m2 you reference below peak power? Reason I ask is that some in the electric energy field apparently prefer to measure electric output in terms of kWh instead of peak power. Thank you for your previous response. bill ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vaclav Smil" To: bpayne37@comcast.net Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2009 11:55:19 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain Subject: RE: fast neutron Depends on location, load factor and overall efficiency. Some exceptional wind farms can be above 5 W/m2 (offshore locations even over 10 W/m2), very large farms in windy areas can average 2 W/m2, but if we were to generate most of the world’s electricity from wind the global mean would be close to 1 W/m2. All my books and many pdfs are at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil _________ bill is linked to http://home.comcast.net/~bpayne37/csdshop/about.htm some in the electric energy field apparently prefer to measure electric output in terms of kWh is linked to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_meter ___________ From: bpayne37@comcast.net [mailto:bpayne37@comcast.net] Sent: December-01-09 11:49 AM To: vsmil@cc.umanitoba.ca Subject: fast neutron Hello professor Smil, bill payne 7.1.09 Mr Goggin As far a wind farms go, is Fast Neutron's statement From actual experience, wind farms produce 1.2 watts per square meter. Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic methods capture 5 to 6 watts per square meter. There is no economy of size in either technology. Dividing the watts you need by those values gives the land area in square meters needed to produce the juice. The numbers are astronomical http://www.topix.net/forum/source/santa-fe-new-mexican/T0QVJ5UD3R25C8HRL From: "Donald Frederick Fournier" dfournie@illinois.edu To: bpayne37@comcast.net Cc: "Ben Joseph Sliwinski" bsliwins@illinois.edu Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 2:58:00 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain Subject: RE: fast neutron on solar and wind electric output Bill, the numbers I like to use are from Vaclav Smil in his 21st Century Energy article. He says solar PV is 20 W per square meter of peak power. He says wind and water power are below 10 W/m2. Biomass is well below 1 W/m2. Don Donald Fournier Chair, Building Research Council Program Manager, SEDAC University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (217) 265-0681 (800) 214-7954 WWW.SEDAC.ORG regards bill
bill payne 12.1.09	No response from professor smil yet. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/
bill payne 12.2.09	My supervisor at UI in 1972/3 was Jim Robertson of Iliac II fame. http://portal.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81332520373 Still no response from Smil.

Do you agree or disagree with this article? Send in your own article.

Add your comments:

Please log in to leave a comment!

back to top