Taki Remtulla
Chief Technology Officer
Abilita
tremtulla@abilita.com

There has been a lot of news in the press recently about SMART electrical grids. Cisco recently announced that Smart Grids will eclipse the size of the Internet and furthermore, Google announced its plans to launch Home Energy Management software. Cisco's move is a sign that the creaky electricity distribution system is poised for a digital upgrade. Other high-tech companies, including IBM, Intel, and several start-ups, are ramping up smart-grid efforts to capitalize on expected investments from utilities and federal governments

Cisco estimates that the communications’ portion of the Smart Grid build-out is worth $100 billion over the next five years. This comes as no surprise, given the governments around the world are announcing major smart grid initiatives, such as the Obama administration’s recovery plan for the US and the European budget commitments on such infrastructure.

The idea of the smart grid is to modernize the electricity industry by overlaying digital communications onto the grid. Smart meters in a person's home, for example, can communicate energy usage to utilities in near real time. That allows the utility to more efficiently manage the electricity supply and potentially allows a consumer to take advantage of cheaper rates. Germany has many great examples of new smart grid architectures where consumers can also supply power to the grid, arrange for their own meter, and subscribe to different energy providers.

But putting smarts into the utility grid is not just about overlying a communications network on top of the electrical distribution system. For smart grids to yield maximum benefits, it has to be about more than just relyaing usage data from the consumers back to the utility – it has to be about automating the entire power distribution system, so that it can respond to demand and supply parameters dynamically and in real time. In other words, the two infrastructures must be tightly integrated, so control algorithms can be developed and applied for features such as load balancing. This level of integration now presents major challenges for the smart grid developers, including IBM and Cisco.

Smart grid communications equipment will have to be tough to operate under severe environmental conditions. For example, equipment on utility poles needs to support operating in temperatures ranging from -35 degrees to +125 degrees F. The current communications equipment simply doesn’t support those requirements. At the same time, utilities equipment is designed to last 40 years. No one will want to go out to a transformer station and replace network cards every three years.

Telcos are also looking to get into the business of home energy management. One major challenge for telecom operators looking at the smart grid opportunity is reliability, which rules out open networks such as GSM. For smart grids, dedicated spectrum or bandwidth is needed to ensure that when the carrier’s network experiences congestion, the smart grid communications don’t get impacted. This model essentially outlines the need for a dedicated, robust network with a very high degree of security to run smart grids.

So you can see that the need for communications network design is still ever present and telecom/technology optimization is now reaching into the energy management space.