Smart Grid Technology Major Topic at DistribuTECH 2010
The primary subject at this year’s DistribuTECH Conference and Exhibition in Tampa, Florida was Smart Grid. Smart Grid is a new architecture for enabling the two-way flow of electricity and information. With a federal investment of $10.5 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it is no wonder this subject dominated the conference and exhibition hall.
The Smart Grid project will replace many of the analog systems with digital systems. This is a change that we have all seen occur in other industries such as television, cell phones, and media for recording sound and video.
This shift to digital brought an interesting combination of attendees to the conference. Most prominent were engineers from the utilities sector and information technologies. The engineers understand the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power. The information technologists understand digital communications and applications software.
I conversed with many of those on the exhibition floor and found that most believe that the concept of the Smart Grid is very much in its infancy. From my perspective, that of an enterprise architect, I believe that this is a fair evaluation. There is still a lot to be understood about self-healing, security, and standards.
There has been a tremendous amount of effort to describe the enterprise architecture of the Smart Grid led by the National Institute of Standards of the U.S. Department of Commerce. They have taken a top-down view and divided the processes into seven business domains. This is shown in the figure below taken from the NIST Special Publication 1108.
Having the NIST driving the effort should guarantee the development of appropriate standards. Standards will level the playing field for the software vendors. This will hopefully reduce the possibility of a few large software suppliers driving their monolithic, silo, and proprietary approaches into the final solution. For all of us, this would mean more competition and a reduced price.
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