Standards are “really essential” to developing the U.S. Smart Grid, says George Arnold, national coordinator for Smart Grid interoperability, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). That’s why NIST is doing everything in its power to fast-track the development of the standards that will help enable the level of interoperability required to make the Smart Grid a reality.
There are more than 3,100 electric utilities that make up the electrical infrastructure in the United States, and each of those networks were built using equipment and systems provided by thousands of suppliers, Arnold explains. Standards will help bridge the gap between the multitude of disparate elements that constitute today’s electric grid and will aid in its transformation into a single, unified Smart Grid.
In June, NIST published its preliminary report proposing priorities for the necessary standards for the Smart Grid. The report was developed in part based on recommendations made by participants in two public workshops held earlier this year.
A third workshop, which was held in August, was specifically organized to garner the input of standards development organizations (SDOs). More than 300 people, including representatives of 20 SDOs, participated in the event.
Peter Pollak, a consultant who recently retired from the Aluminum Association, an SDO, attended the two-day workshop. He says the event focused on standards development: “What can be done to accelerate development? How can we make this happen using the best practices of standards development? Each of these organizations has different standards development models and I think one of the things they tried to do is flesh out all the different ways and hopefully they’re going to use the best ones because they’re going to have to move ahead with this as quickly as possible. We can’t wait for three years to develop these common standards that are going to be the basis of the Smart Grid.”
While each SDO has its own way of developing standards, one thing they have in common is a reliance on volunteers to do the work—a factor which can dramatically slow down the development process.
“There’s a lot of inefficiency in the standards process because traditionally it’s done by volunteers who have day jobs,” says Arnold. “So in the traditional approach, you have people who come together a few times a year and contributions for the work at these meetings are often done in the weeks or months leading up to the event, but there’s a lot of dead space during which not much is happening. So what we’re trying to do for the critical standards that need to be done soon is to encourage the SDOs to involve people on a more full-time basis for a concentrated period of time to produce these deliverables quickly as opposed to spreading out part-time work over several years.”
Some of this encouragement may come in the form of payments to people working on standards. Arnold points to the Department of Homeland Security as an example of an organization that has funded SDOs to accelerate the development of critical standards. He says that under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, $10 million was transferred from the Department of Energy to NIST to speed up the standards development process, and some of that money may go to SDOs to aid in the effort.
“But what we’re also doing is looking for a strong commitment from industry,” Arnold says. It already looks like that is happening. According to Arnold, during a kickoff meeting for the Smart Grid at the White House in May, one of the CEOs attending the event “made this observation about how the [standards development] process works and how industry, by applying their resources in a more dedicated way, can really speed up the process. We’re looking for industry to step up to the plate and make that commitment, and among the CEOs that were at the White House, there was strong consensus that it needs to be done.”
NIST is now moving into a new phase of standards development for the Smart Grid. In September, it published Release 1.0 of its NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework. It is also forming a panel consisting of key stakeholders to identify, prioritize and address new and emerging requirements for Smart Grid interoperability and security. The panel’s first meeting is scheduled for November.