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Communicating Smart Meter Value

Sep 9 2010 - 2010-01-01 12:00:00 - Your City

If you are involved in Management or Customer Service and are responsible for communicating the value of smart meters to your utility customers, you don’t want to miss this online discussion - Communicating Smart Meter Value.  more...

Social Media: The new frontier in recruiting, communications and marketing

Sep 13 2010 - 2010-01-01 12:00:00 - Your City

Join social media mavens Matthew Burks and Amanda Shewmake as they provide an insider's perspective on how HR, communications and marketing professionals in energy companies can harness the power of social media to be more effective and productive. more...

Eliminating Obstacles and Delivering the Benefits of the Smart Grid - IBM's Optimized Energy Value Chain (OEVC)

Sep 14 2010 - 2010-01-01 12:00:00 - Your City

The convergence of power and information technologies in the smart grid has created opportunities for finer grained and broader controls of energy flows. These opportunities can improve electric service in multiple dimensions: lower cost, greater reliability, greater customer satisfaction, and more...

Achieving Operational Excellence - What to Consider Before Implementing or Upgrading Your Distribution Management Solutions

Sep 16 2010 - 2010-01-01 12:00:00 - Your City

Significant cost over runs. Changing business requirements. A well thought out plan is essential. Attend this free webcast discussion to hear inside hear three experts in utility operations discuss what utilities need to evaluate when they are considering upgrading or more...

Outsmarting the Smart Grid: IT, Security and Communication Infrastructure  Challenges & Opportunities for Utilities

Sep 21 2010 - 2010-01-01 12:00:00 - Your City

The smart grid is shifting the playing field for utilities. And when the game changes, it pays to be prepared. A nimble solutions partner can help you design the solutions that keep operations on track, even as new challenges come more...

1st CSP Today Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Summit India

Sep 7 2010 - Sep 8 2010 - New Delhi India

Deliver a profitable, productive and commercially successful large scale CSP business in India. Building on the success of past events in USA, Europe & MENA, CSP Today brings to New Delhi the most relevant international experience for the concentrated solar more...

Offshore Wind Energy in North America's Great Lakes Conference

Sep 9 2010 - Sep 10 2010 - Toronto

Two day conference that tackles the most important challenges. A blend of European knowledge from the companies who have been installing offshore wind turbines for the last decade alongside local state governing bodies and leading project developers. Permitting, securing long more...

Autovation 2010

Sep 12 2010 - Sep 15 2010 - Austin, TX - USA

Autovation 2010 is a not-to-miss educational forum that will attract utility executives from around the world looking for new ways to optimize their operations through automation technologies. more...

Global Sustainable Bioenergy North American Convention

Sep 14 2010 - Sep 16 2010 - Minneapolis, MN - USA

The North American convention provides a remarkable opportunity to play a part in guiding renewable energy policy for the 21st century. Attendees will create a resolution that, along with similar resolutions already drafted on four other continents, will help set more...

GridWise Global Forum

Sep 21 2010 - Sep 23 2010 - Washington, DC - USA

Hosted by the GridWise(R) Alliance and the U.S. Department of Energy, the GridWise Global Forum will convene thought leaders from the highest levels of government, business, NGOS, and academia from around the world to discuss the ultimate enabling potential of more...

1. Intro to Nat Gas Trading & Hedging 2. Option Applications in Energy

Sep 20 2010 - Sep 23 2010 - Houston, TX - USA

Introduction to Natural Gas Trading & Hedging - This program provides a comprehensive understanding of the structures that underlie Natural Gas trading. Beyond Essentials: Option Applications in Energy - This course provides a solid practical and conceptual (non-quantitative) understanding of more...

Electric Business Understanding Seminar

Sep 20 2010 - Sep 21 2010 - Houston, TX - USA

Electric Business Understanding provides a comprehensive overview of the electric industry. Position yourself for career advancement by gaining a solid understanding of how the electric business works including key physical, market, and regulatory aspects and how market participants navigate this more...

Electric Market Dynamics Seminar

Sep 22 2010 - Sep 23 2010 - Houston, TX - USA

Electric Market Dynamics offers participants an in-depth understanding of North American electric markets and how they function. Enhance your career by furthering your knowledge of market structures, pricing mechanisms, services offered in markets, and how various participants use the markets more...

Gas and Electric Business Understanding Seminar

Oct 5 2010 - Oct 6 2010 - Los Angeles, CA - USA

Gas and Electric Business Understanding provides a comprehensive overview of the natural gas and electric industries. Position yourself for career success by gaining a solid understanding of how each business works, including key physical, market and regulatory aspects, as well more...

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The Smart Grid Ready Framework, Part I
11.11.09   Larsh Johnson, President and CTO, eMeter Corporation

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    The smart grid is a rapidly evolving combination of new intelligent networks, information systems and regulations. The promise of smart grid is to allow utilities and consumers to manage energy generation, distribution and usage in real-time, and to collaborate to drive energy efficiency. Arguably, this promise will be most acutely demonstrated in the "last mile" of the grid -- that portion encompassing the infrastructure and management processes where utility meets consumer and supply versus demand is optimized.

    As the intelligent grid takes form, the organizational boundaries and business processes defining today's utility will be broken and reformed, with interconnected communities of collaborating suppliers and consumers. Utilities will migrate from an operational model designed to interact with consumers on a monthly basis to one that supports on-demand, two-way communications supported by information processed in real-time.

    For the utility, the evolution to smart grid will involve a continuum of business process re-engineering (BPR), and information systems for grid management must change on a large scale to support this transition. In this environment, utilities and their IT organizations face material challenges:

    • They must navigate this transition without impacting their existing business operations and customers.
    • Too costly to replace, existing IT systems must be connected and extended to provide smart grid-useful information and automation for real-time business processes.
    • Projects must demonstrate early return without becoming mired in complexity.
    • Faced with continuous change in requirements that define "smart grid", utilities can ill-afford to make inflexible IT investments.
    Despite these challenges, the transition to smart grid is underway and utilities cannot wait for the dust to settle before they begin deploying management systems that will drive operations in the immediate future. Implementing systems within a "smart grid ready" design framework can insulate utilities from complexity and risk in this fluid environment, and ensure utilities can adapt to meet the challenges and seize opportunities as the grid takes shape. This paper will outline the key components of the framework; discuss the requirements for, and respective benefits accrued, from each component.

    Framework Definition

    The Smart Grid Ready Framework is a strategic application blueprint that helps ensure grid management implementations deliver business value as expected. The framework is defined by five components:

    • Support for real-time grid management
    • Support for process interoperability and data exchange within and between enterprises
    • Support for Web-based consumer engagement
    • Inclusion of tools to manage deployment, operation and maintenance of AMI, HAN, and other smart grid systems
    • Designed to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) standards
    Utilities can use the framework as a top-down primer for evaluating, planning and deploying the IT systems that will power their transition to smart grid. Today these systems include Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks and devices, Meter Data Management (MDM) systems, and Smart Grid Management applications. Together, these form the foundation for utility-specific applications such as Advanced Metering, Customer Service, Demand Response, Consumer Engagement or Distribution Grid Automation. Implementing systems within a smart grid ready framework can:

    • Speed migration to AMI and smart grid management
    • Ensure current and future smart grid technologies meet business expectations
    • Insulate utilities from implementation complexity
    • Minimize duplicate systems and application silos
    • Enable systems to incrementally evolve without disruption
    • Allow utilities/consumer collaboration to save energy
    The following sections of this paper will provide an overview of the components:

    1. Real-Time Grid Management

    The need for a real-time infrastructure is a pervasive theme within the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and U.S. Department of Energy specs for smart grid. This is driven by requirements for real-time monitoring and control of the distribution grid, time-based energy pricing and two-way consumer/supplier participation in the process. Effective adoption of smart grid and the processes that make it run must be based on a robust platform that can handle event-driven distribution of information and execution of business process in a way that is consistent, reliable and auditable.

    Key functional attributes are:

    • Continuous validation and processing of meter interval, sensor and other data
    • Real-time handling of alerts, exceptions, messages and network events
    • On-demand, bi-directional exchange of current, consistent information between systems and users
    • Support for just-in-time operations between dependent systems and processes
    • Online provisioning of newly installed meters, HAN devices, distribution switches and other hardware
    Smart Grid Real-time Applications

    In a smart grid context, AMI collection and recording of meter interval data is necessary but insufficient. Providing data based on monthly, even daily, estimates is not useful. Interval data must be validated continuously and made immediately available for any use -- as it is received. In addition, exceptions, alerts or messages required to invoke action must be processed on-demand. In the new world, demand response requires the marriage of time-based rates with real-time consumer usage patterns so informed choices are made about how to optimize supply, cost and usage. Dispatchable time-of-use or critical peak pricing are event-driven processes requiring a real-time infrastructure. Soon, real-time control commands and receipt verification of home and commercial devices must be supported.

    Today's Real-time Challenges

    Future capabilities notwithstanding, timing is everything, especially with a utility's first smart grid step: meter-to-cash applications. These deployments link meter installation, provisioning, interval data validation, billing and customer service processes in a dependent fashion. Just-in-time events must be handled and current data must be available at the precise time required by each process. If billing is based on stale data, or today's service logistics are executed on yesterday's status, the process will be inefficient and invariably generate complaints from customers. With a real-time infrastructure, outage alarms can be received and power restoration checked immediately. Service can be enabled while a customer is on the phone. Meters (and other devices) can be provisioned while service crews are in the area to handle problems, and cut over when ready.

    Scalability for Real-time Processing

    Real-time smart grid management must be designed to handle extreme loads. Systems must be able to accommodate growth from thousands to millions of grid devices and data points -- and potentially billions of pieces of dynamic data. Advanced Metering networks, MDM solutions and their dependent applications should be designed to validate and process these data on a continuous basis, rather than with a batch approach. Finally, vendor systems should carry an independent benchmark to validate capability to handle multi-million meter deployments.

    2. Multi-Process Interoperability

    To effectively manage operations, improve customer interaction and increase energy efficiency in a smart grid context, utilities must extend their IT systems to support process interoperability and data exchange within and between enterprises.

    Interoperability Within the Enterprise

    Today, many of a utility's IT systems are monolithic applications designed to manage single discrete processes (e.g., billing, service logistics, call center, asset management, etc.). Process interoperability is driven by manual or periodic batch data exchange and synchronization. To manage events and exchange data across systems within the enterprise in an end-to-end flow, feeding each dependent process at the optimal time, utilities must re-engineer toward a more real-time, integrated view.

    For example, when deploying initial AMI meter-to-cash applications, systems should be extensible beyond the stovepipe process of collecting interval data and feeding the billing system. Deployment should be easily extended to incorporate processes such as asset lifecycle management, service requests and incident resolution.

    A smart grid ready infrastructure should also support availability of current data from multiple systems to complete real-time call center processes such as new accounts, turn on service or customer moves all while the customer is on the phone. The system should be extensible to migrate this process to a Web-based self service model.

    Interoperability Between Enterprises

    In an extended enterprise model in which several companies are involved in energy distribution, process execution must span company boundaries and access to data must be managed to each entity's authorized view. Beyond traditional utilities, participating entities can include aggregators, retailers, distributors, market operators, service providers and consumers. For example, a merged utility may need to support multiple operational models serving customers and regulatory bodies in multiple states, provinces or countries. A meter operator may have to deliver data from a common source to distribution companies, energy retailers and to a market settlement agency -- each with differing requirements.

    These applications require interoperability between multiple legacy CIS, asset management, logistics systems and potentially multiple AMI/smart meter infrastructures, each with differing process flows and data models. With state-of the-art deployments, an MDM system is the core component to enable this integration. Integration should be enabled without disruption or changes to in-place application logic. A single platform should support multiple instances of "customized" process flow and provide the data management, audit trail and access control to deliver appropriate, authorized views of information created by the overall system. This includes automated aggregation of information from multiple operational systems to provide consistent datasets for planning, pricing, forecasting and other analytics.

    Incremental Deployment

    Finally, multi-process systems should be configurable for modular deployment: allowing a tailored implementation to meet the functional requirements of a pilot, but scaling in-place to add new capabilities. This will enable the utility to "think big" while starting small, enabling it to demonstrate early success and then scale fast.

    The second part of this two-part article will cover the final three components: consumer engagement, tools for deployment of smart grid devices, and adaptive, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

    For information on purchasing reprints of this article, contact Tim Tobeck ttobeck@energycentral.com.
    Copyright 2010 CyberTech, Inc.
     
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    Readers Comments

    Date Comment
    Bob Amorosi
    11.11.09
    Nice article describing the complexities in managing the smart grid transformation of a utility company. I hope the future Part 2 of the article will entertain the subject of how a utility company will bear the huge costs of deploying smart grid, especially with equipping residential consumers with the in-home technology tools they need to engage them much more in a smart grid.

    German Ibanez
    11.18.09
    Thank you for your article. In terms of data storage, how long is real time data kept? Compared to current technology grids, what is the additional cost in data storage to implement a smart grid system?

    Len Gould
    11.19.09
    German: I have some preliminary answers for that. Let's assume the following table structure for this data:

    CREATE TABLE METER_DATA (METER_ID NUMBER(10,0) NOT NULL, READ_DT TIMESTAMP(0) NOT NULL, PREDICTED_WATTS NUMBER(10,0) NULL, CONSUMED_WATTS NUMBER(10,0) NULL, CUSTOMER_ID NUMBER(7,0) NOT NULL, SUPPLIER_ID NUMBER(10,0) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY (METER_ID, READ_DT) USING INDEX PCTFREE 10 INITRANS 2 MAXTRANS 255 TABLESPACE avail_index STORAGE ( INITIAL 163840 NEXT 163840 PCTINCREASE 0 MINEXTENTS 1 MAXEXTENTS 2147483645 ) )

    We can presume that the database system can store numeric data in internal binary numeric form, so any positive integer up to 2 billion will require only 4 bytes, a Date+Time will require 8 bytes, each meter has an associated scaling factor to handle a broad range of possible customer sizes, and the entire data structure is stored on the primary key index. This results in a row storage requirement of 30 bytes per row.

    The outcome is that 1 day's 15 minute interval readings for 1 million customers generate 2.9 gigabytes. 31 days = 90 gig. 12 months = 1,100 gig. Assuming a 250 gig disk drive costs $200 (my desktop at home has two of those), and all data is stored in a RAID1 array which duplicates all data, requiring 2,200 gig per year, the total year's disk storage costs 2,200 / 250 * $200 = about $2,000. That's about $0.002 per customer per year. Of course there will be additional data structures required, so let's quintuple that amount, to $0.01 per customer per year.

    john Marsh
    5.26.10
    urrent smart meter technology is still modeled after the old conventional electromechanical service meters where each has a electronic display on its web templates face that shows cumulative energy consumption at that customer's site. To credit the customer for a portion of the displayed total home based business each time another customer's vehicle is charged would mean the meter must also adjust downwards its display to reflect only the energy billed to the property owner. Similarly the meter at the vehicle owner's site would be appropriately adjusted upwards to reflect his billing. If these meter displays are not adjusted, it opens the door to widespread billing disputes between customers and the utility, which is a nightmare the utilities will fiercely avoid at any cost.Moreover, here in Canada we have the Measurement Canada agency of our federal government that tests and approves all utility meter designs before authorizing them for commercial use on homes by utilities. One of their criteria for certification of smart meters is they will only mobile homes for sale permit meters that are tamper proof, where customers AND the utilities are both prevented from altering a meter's internal programming for any reason, especially anything that would change the total energy consumption displayed. As such a utility cannot even upgrade a meter's software for any reason without replacing the cheap travel insurance meter, even when the meters are designed to be field upgradeable using simple software reprogramming.

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