While people are still debating what the Smart Grid will look like, one thing is for certain: it will be much more intelligent than the United States’ current electric grid. Some of the potential Smart Grid concepts being discussed include an advanced metering infrastructure to give consumers insight into their real-time power use, wide-area grid visualization, advanced sensors and zero-net energy buildings. All of these capabilities will be supported by devices attached to the grid—devices that, despite their potential to make the grid more energy-efficient and cost-effective, may create new security concerns for the country.
“As you employ information technology to make the grid more efficient, more responsive and more flexible, you don’t want to introduce security vulnerabilities that make it less reliable,” says Eric Cosman, a member of the International Society of Automation (ISA), an automation standards developing organization with 30,000 members. Cosman is co-chair of the ISA99 committee, which develops industrial automation and control system security standards.
Today, the grid’s greatest vulnerability is its centralized, interdependent structure. This means a single attack could bring down the entire grid. On the other hand, the Smart Grid will be much more decentralized. Yet that infrastructure carries its own risks, such as a greater number of entry points through which attackers can access the grid.
“If you spend very much time looking at the development of the Smart Grid, you’ll realize very quickly that it involves lots of control systems, metering or instrumentation systems and lots of intelligent devices communicating with each other. So there are new vulnerabilities to systems because there are literally hundreds and thousands of potential intelligent devices that are going to be connected to the electric grid network,” says Paul Goodson, managing director of the Automation Federation, an umbrella organization that’s focused on advancing the automation profession. Its membership includes experts in industrial automation and control systems cyber security, industrial wireless sensors and systems interoperability.
Concerns about security are a major reason why ISA and the Automation Federation, which was founded by ISA, have been advocating for the usage of automation professionals in the planning for and development of the Smart Grid. In June, both organizations were gratified to see their work recognized with the release of a report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The report, which proposes priorities for developing technical standards and an architecture for the Smart Grid, referenced several ISA standards developed by the ISA99 committee as well as ISA100, a committee focused on wireless systems for automation.
The release of the report was good news to ISA and the Automation Federation, which continue to emphasize the need for involving people with automation expertise in the Smart Grid project.
“We’ve been trying to make sure that everyone involved understood the importance of automation professionals in this whole discussion, that we didn’t just have policy makers, we didn’t just have administrators making these decisions, that we brought technical expertise to the table to make sure they understood the issues involved,” says Goodson.
With ongoing debate as to what exactly constitutes the Smart Grid—Is it just the transmission and distribution network, or does it encompass more of the edge applications, such as the generation facilities on one end and the electricity consumers on the other?—the extent of the input needed from ISA and the Automation Federation is still unknown.
However, both organizations are hoping to contribute as much as possible to the Smart Grid initiative.
“The ISA99 committee is ready, willing and able to provide any of our work products and promote the use of our work products in the Smart Grid, and the Smart Grid documents are starting to acknowledge already that ISA in general—and ISA99 in particular—is one of the standards groups that they’re going to draw on,” says Cosman. “The implicit offer that we make to them is if there’s anything that we can do to adjust or focus our standards to make them more applicable and more useful in the energy sector and Smart Grid specifically, then let’s talk about that. Our goal is to make the ISA99 standards as broadly applicable across industries and applications as possible.”