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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.
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
- 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
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
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).
