The advent of the smart grid has been announced numerous times during the past 15 years. It has been simultaneously encouraging and discouraging to witness the progress towards an environment of intelligent energy management during that period. Few great advances arrive without serious headwinds. Particularly in such a “smokestack”-affiliated industry as electric utilities, change can be glacial.
The “science” surrounding innovative technologies has always held far less interest for me than the practical application of those technologies. It is not what it is, but what it can do, that intrigues me and feeds into my constantly evolving view of the world and the industries and markets that comprise the global marketplace.
A dozen years ago, I participated in sketching out an early architecture for the concept of the Smart Home as part of the broader smart energy initiative and have a continuing interest in the advancement of the technologies that comprise what is now referred to as the Smart Grid. A simple graphic of the smart grid environment is represented below.
Managing energy demand and optimizing energy usage are fundamental to any strategy/philosophy/approach to arriving at a sustainable and clean energy economy. To that end, electric utilities are being encouraged to utilize smart-grid technology -- network-connected devices to help intelligently monitor and manage power usage -- whether on their dime or through funding from the U.S. government's 2009 stimulus package. Smart energy systems are designed to save energy via intelligent management of energy usage in homes and businesses. Beyond that activity at the point of consumption, the smart grid seeks to promote improved optimization at every point between generation and consumption to actively manage the grid.
As this proposed build out of the smart grid is, for the most part, a digital network solution, the question/concern of hacking the system necessarily arises. However real and mature the threat, it does create new challenges for utilities to meet to ensure safety, reliability, etc. for their residential and commercial customer bases. The threat may be most acute at those interfaces where smart grid platforms are required to integrate with older control equipment such as SCADA ( Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems as well as the first generation of smart meters.
As more and more processes in every industry become digitally-driven, we will face these same kinds of challenges. In many cases, such as with the smart grid effort, they will be met and overcome because their is simply no alternative.
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