In June, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it had finalized rules for its Smart Grid Investment Grant program and would be providing a total of $3.3 billion in grants ranging in value from $500,000 to $200 million. The rules for the program incorporate several recommendations made by the Smart Grid Advisory Panel convened by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA).
NEMA has been involved in the development of what has been termed the Smart Grid since the set of improvements to the national electric grid were first proposed in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007. As a stakeholder in the industry, NEMA is mentioned in Section 1305 of EISA, which describes the Smart Grid Interoperability Framework.
“We’re chartered to work with [the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)] on the interoperability framework, which is the selection of the protocols and standards that will permit the various elements of the grid to work together to improve performance,” says Paul Molitor, director of Smart Grid, NEMA.
Molitor says NIST has split up the work on standards development for the Smart Grid into three parts, with the first two focusing on existing standards—both those that can be used as-is and those that need some updating or synchronization with other standards. The third part, however, will involve the development of entirely new standards.
In keeping with its plan to identify the necessary standards and expedite their development, NIST published its “Initial List of Smart Grid Interoperability Standards” in early June. Later that month, NIST released its interim report on the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Roadmap that proposes the priorities and methods for developing the remaining standards for the Smart Grid. The public had until July 20 to comment on the report.
“There are going to be all kinds of functionality that we desire for which no standards have previously been written,” he says. “So as a standards development organization, we are going to have to go out and identify what that work looks like and then go through the process of writing the standards so that NIST has the opportunity to endorse those as well.”
Work on the Smart Grid is divided among three different groups within NEMA. One group is focused on overarching requirements, such as the generation, transmission and distribution of energy. A second group, the NEMA Energy and Storage Council, is dealing with issues associated with demand management and incorporating renewable energy sources into the Smart Grid.
“You may have solar photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, but what do you do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? You have to find a way to level out the curve for the amount of power that they’re able to put into the network. And what it’s going to come down to is energy storage as the means to do that,” says Molitor.
The third group is the NEMA High Performance Buildings Council, which is examining ways to enable buildings to become net-zero energy users.
“The concept of net zero is over a period of time,” Molitor explains. “It’s not always instantaneous. There are going to be times when they have to draw off the grid, but ideally, more often than not, they’ll be providing energy back to the grid for periods of peak demand.”
NEMA is also interested in making sure people stay focused on another important Smart Grid issue: resilience. Earlier this year, the organization sent an open letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) emphasizing the importance of cyber security for the Smart Grid.
In the letter, the organization wrote, “NEMA agrees that first and foremost, security and resiliency must be part of the design consideration for any Smart Grid component from its inception. At the same time, designing and building the entire grid to the highest resiliency standards would simply make it too costly to undertake any form of national modernization project. Interactions between grid components should therefore be able to be segmented in such a way that faults can be isolated and power is ensured to the most critical infrastructure items.”
The reason for the letter, says Molitor, was to point out that parallel efforts—increasing the electric grid’s intelligence and ensuring its security—must be considered together.
“If you consider the priorities of the agencies within the federal government, you could have DHS leading us in one direction (security) and the Department of Energy in another (efficiency),” he says. “Both of their priorities need to be synchronized in order to get the most out of everyone’s Smart Grid effort.”