The Smart Grid wireless WAN white paper is available for download.

Related content:

1. White Paper – The HAN Gateway Architecture: Future-Proofing Considerations
2. On-Demand Webinar – Application Domain Partitioning for Smart Grid Security
3. What is a Smart Grid?

White Paper – Wireless WAN for the Smart Grid was posted at Trilliant. | http://www.trilliantinc.com

Key elements include:

• Intelligent Networks: Two-way “internet like” networking equipment and software, usually using wireless communications. These communications utilize standard protocols such as IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.14 to ensure compatibility and interoperability. The network extends from inside the home to the electric meter or nearby power pole through a series of data concentrators, and eventually through the internet. The system combines private communications for utility operations and public, but secure, communications to allow consumers to interact with their energy control devices remotely.
• In-Home Devices: Smart thermostats that can be adjusted remotely by the utility, or the consumer to save energy during peak loads, high-energy prices, or changes in renewable energy production. Thermostats manage up to 40% of household energy use and with proper controls and programming, can save 10% to 30% per year in heating and cooling costs, a total of over $300 per average home, or over $25 Billion per year in the U.S. (Data from EIA). In-home energy displays inform customers of their energy usage and cost in real time, and can communicate urgent messages from the utility. These have been shown to save an additional 5% of electricity use, or over $4 Billion per year. Load control switches can be connected to pool pumps electric water heaters, and other loads, saving an additional several percent of energy usage. There are already several million-load control switches installed in the U.S. by utilities over the past twenty-five years.
• Grid Monitoring and Control Devices: Transformer monitors, voltage sensors, and other devices help provide a more rapid response to power outages, and allow better coordination of the grid in response to renewable resources, solar, and distributed generation.
• Electric Vehicle Integration: Vehicle connection stations supporting safe delivery of power to vehicles which draw as much as five homes, vehicle identification for billing purposes, and the coordination necessary to let vehicles serve as batteries and backup power for the grid.

Why the Smart Grid is Needed

Utility companies strive to reduce carbon emissions. The U.S. energy grid is the source of one-third of America’s atmospheric carbon dioxide. Each 1 MM premises that are connected to a Smart Grid is equivalent to replacing 3.3 MM light bulbs or 833,000 tons of CO2. Furthermore, optimizing the management of energy supply and demand means a reduction in the likelihood of crippling regional blackouts. Power outages cost the U.S. $80 billion every year, with the August 2003 Cleveland blackouts alone resulting in $4.5-12 billion in lost economic activity.

Governments around the world are putting regulatory guidelines in place to help utilities adopt best practices with respect to Smart Grid implementations. The government of Ontario, Canada, through the “Energy Conservation Responsibility Act in 2006,” has mandated the installation of Smart Meters in all Ontario businesses and households by 2010. Considered one of the most forward-thinking policies in North America, the policy has catalyzed the region to the point where Ontario is the de facto leader in implementing the Smart Grid. In the U.S., initiatives such as the “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007″ have created guidelines and mandates with respect to Smart Grid adoption.

“The need for two-way communication between the utility and its customers lies at the heart of all Smart Grid initiatives,” said Ahmad Faruqui of The Brattle Group. “Such communication allows dynamic pricing to be transmitted to customers and it also enables customers to automatically curtail usage during critical hours and to shift energy consumption from high-priced peak periods to low-priced off-peak periods. In this fashion, both parties work synergistically to manage the cost, delivery and environmental impact of power generation and energy services delivery. I applaud the work that companies like Trilliant are doing in this area. They are bringing that day closer when all customers will start to benefit from the Smart Grid.”

Who benefits from the Smart Grid

The Smart Grid enables multiple constituencies to accomplish their economic and environmental goals related to energy use and energy production.

• Consumers: By providing information on energy use in real time, and by providing controls that are both more advanced and accessible from any location, consumers will be much more able to reduce their energy consumption, carbon footprint, and energy costs. Today’s consumers have no “gas gauge” or “gas station price” to inform their home energy decisions. It will be essential to provide these tools to consumers if we expect to make significant progress on energy efficiency.
• Utilities: Utilities need the Smart Grid to support increasing penetration and use of solar, wind, energy storage, and other clean energy technologies (especially “intermittent” and distributed generation), to be able to provide high quality, reliable power to drive economic growth, to properly bill their customers and implement Federal, State, and Local policy initiatives, and to avoid the construction of unnecessary fossil fuel fired generation and new transmission.
• Communities: Increasingly, real or virtual communities, such as cities, universities, major corporations, and even community based or national groups, are coming together to reduce their energy use, integrate the energy use with renewable resources. These entities need a Smart Grid to have visibility, control, and coordination of their efforts to comply with environmental and economic initiatives, whether driven by regulation, or by their own sense of civic or environmental duty.

Key Policy Issues

• The Smart Grid is essential to achieving aggressive energy efficiency and renewable energy goals. Therefore, funding of initiatives to promote efficiency and renewables should include support for the Smart Grid technologies that will be foundational to their success.
• Implementing smart meters and time-of-use prices is important—but not enough. Achieving the full benefits and energy savings will require providing customers with other components of the smart grid including in-home tools and devices to manage their energy consumption proactively and automatically.
• As with the Internet, open standards and interoperability—rather than proprietary technologies— are crucial to efficient and widespread use of the smart grid including plug-and-play integration of new and innovative devices to come. With this architecture obsolescence can be avoided, and the benefits of smart grid investments today will be reaped for decades to come.

Federal Policy Considerations

• Providing substantial Federal financing to promote an expedited roll out of utility-based Smart Grid systems. This could include a direct Federal cost-share, funding of the Grid Investment Matching Program, establishment of an Investment Tax Credit for qualifying smart grid technologies, further reduction of depreciation period for smart grid technologies to five years, and/or creation of a national smart grid infrastructure fund financed by a nationwide “system benefits charge” of a fraction of a cent at the wholesale transmission level.
• Any of the above could be incorporated into the pending stimulus package with an incentive structure favoring early decisions by utilities and their respective state public utility commissions. This would help achieve earlier economic and job creation benefits. For example, a Federal cost share could be offered with two distinct multi-year declining schedules (100% Federal coverage year one, 50% year two, etc.), with one schedule offering a higher Federal share only to those utilities who contract for a smart grid rollout and secure PUC approval by a near-term date certain.
• Insisting that open standards and interoperability are cornerstones of all deployments (TCP/IP, ANSI C12.22, IEEE 802.11, 802.15.4).
• Encouraging an active consumer role in all Smart Grid deployments.

Related content:

1. Smart Grid Industry News Roundup: 06/15/2010
2. Smart Grid Industry News Roundup: 02/23/2010
3. Smart Grid Industry News Roundup: 03/16/2010

What is a Smart Grid? was posted at Trilliant. | http://www.trilliantinc.com

Long-term viability
Thoroughly proven
Global supply chain
Industry expertise
Low cost via economies of scale Interoperable / no vendor lock-in

Related content:

1. NIST Standards
2. White Paper – Wireless WAN for the Smart Grid
3. Smart Grid Industry News Roundup: 02/09/2010

Why Are Standards Important for a Smart Grid Deployment? was posted at Trilliant. | http://www.trilliantinc.com

The Smart Grid is going through an evolution unlike anything the electric grid has seen in nearly a century. As shown in the diagram above, this evolution can basically be segmented into distinct versions of the Smart Grid:

1. Smart Grid v0.0 – this wouldn’t even be classified as a “smart” network since each network used proprietary protocols to read meters on isolated networks. This phase is typically associated with automated meter reading (AMR).
2. Smart Grid v1.0 – this is the advent of “advanced metering”, a smarted version of AMR. Not only are meters automatically read, but standards-based solutions are used to provide applications like demand response and time-of-use (TOU) billing. In addition, utilities now have the ability to interact with energy usage through direct load control and controllable thermostats. At the time of this writing, this is basically the state-of-the-art.
3. Smart Grid v2.0 – the next phase of the Smart Grid is when the consumer becomes directly involved with energy utilization.
4. Smart Grid v3.0 – the future of the Smart Grid, where plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and micro-grids of distributed generation interact with the grid to balance energy supply and demand.

Related content:

1. Smart Grid Privacy, Smart Grid Tech Evolution & More : 09/07/2010
2. What is a Smart Grid?
3. Smart Grid Industry News Roundup: 02/09/2010

The Evolution of the Smart Grid was posted at Trilliant. | http://www.trilliantinc.com