Welcome. Onward we go on our journey to overview and understand Special NIST Document 1108, the NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards. Over the recent past and in the near future YHA (your humble author) will guide you, the ISGO (interested Smart Grid observer) on a simple quest, with the goal of knowing when and where to look more deeply into this important document when you need to. If you want to catch up, you can review the previous week's blogs, or send me an email and I'll get you the text. This week, we're going to delve into Chapt 4 - Standards Identified for Implementation. It might sound dry, but stay with us for a minute. You'll find that, in fact, standards can be darn close to mildly interesting. Kidding. This stuff is pretty important, so pls read on.
But before we take the plunge, a word about YHA's hiatus of last week. Apologies. I was on vacation at my family's ranch, just west of Steamboat Springs, CO. I had fully intended to write a blog last week, but alas ... vacation at the ranch is not like vacation that town people know and love. I don't know what I was thinking. In our case, vacation usually means working pretty near all the time from about 6a to 8p. Last week, irrigating mostly, with some fence fixing and a few hrs of riding to check cows. In the country where I am from, we don't say 'round up', unless we're talking about a pesticide. We say 'gather'. And we did have a couple of gathers, moving cattle off one mountain and onto another. In the rain. I pretty much figured out how to get wet every dang day last week. Which reminds me that a loyal reader recently bemoaned the lack of ranch analogies and life lessons in this blog. But rest assured that sooner or later, YHA will find a way to connect some aspect raising cattle in the mountains with the Smart Grid. Whether it makes sense or not.
Meantime, let's talk about Standards for Implementation. Chapt 4 starts off with a brief discussion of how the Stakeholders (pls see Blog No. 2) discussed and identified the standards that will make the Smart Grid interoperable. There were 2 public workshops, and a lot of follow-up from there, where existing standards and gaps were discussed. That resulted in 16 standards and specifications being identified as useful. After that list was published, NIST took comments, and expanded the list to 31. That list is presented in a table starting on page 32, which is in Sec 4.2 for those of you keeping score at home.
Looking at a list of 31 publications can be kind of daunting. It won't surprise any ISGO that the majority of the standards are from 1 of 4 major sources: ANSI, IEC, IEEE, and IETF (that's the Internet Engineering Task Force, if you're not up on that one). The rest are various groups and organizations that are focused on a specific aspect of communications or technology, like ZigBee Alliance or OPC, or a standards group like MultiSpeak. Speaking of MultiSpeak, that standard was not among the first 16 identified, but was added in the second round. That's a good thing in YHA's view, because many smaller utilities have already adopted MS as a way of interconnecting systems. The standard will certainly have to grow to support the interop of a smart grid, but as a baseline, MS is in use now and will be helpful.
On that topic, here are a couple of hints about some of the most important of the Big 31. If you're interested in smart metering - and really, who isn't? - then you should look carefully at ANSI C12.19 (http://webstore.ansi.org), which is about revenue models, and AMI-SEC System Security Requirements. (This is a publication of UCA, so I think you can find it at http://osgog.ucaiug.org.) And in fact, the whole ANSI C12 suite is worth a look in this vein.
For application integration and management, you can't beat the good ol' IEC 61968/61970, which cover a lot of territory and can be found at http://webstore.iec.ch. For one thing, there is a very good and useful interface reference model in 61968, plus a bunch of use cases and message types. And, the Common Information Model (CIM) is presented and referenced in both these standards. The CIM is one of those things that you should really be familiar with, if you are at all considering your own sg. It is a topic unto itself, so we won't go further here. But we will all find it helpful to understand the concepts and content of the CIM. Trust me.
If you're thinking about distributed generation, the currently-accepted standard is IEEE 1547 (https://swbsweb.ieee.org). For home area network information, I think you'll find the ZigBee Smart Energy Profile (http://www.zigbee.org) well worth a look-see. Security in general is a whole other topic. NERC CIP is cited, and so is NIST Special Publication 800-82, which will eventually be incorporated into the Cyber Security Special Document 7628, now out in draft form. You know I hate to leave you hangin', so let's make a deal: we'll spend time on cyber sec down the road.
Several of the other standards are about lower-level things like individual protocols and mark-up languages. YHA wouldn't be the GIS guy that he really is without adding GML from the Open Geospatial Consortium (http://www.opengeospatial.org) to the list. But really, you don't need it unless you need it. Know what I'm sayin'?
Some of these are available free, but for some you'll have to get out your checkbook. Many of the Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) depend on selling the standards work to fund their efforts. There has been some discussion in certain corners that maybe the ol' US Gov't ought to get into the business of funding the requisite SDOs and making the documents available to qualified users gratis. But I dunno. That sounds like it might get complicated. Although the list is well defined for now, more standards are going to be added, and I'm guessing that sooner or later, somebody is going to think that their standards work should be funded, while others will disagree. Anyways, for now, you'll have to ante up.
On the topic of more standards, Sec 4.3 follows with a discussion of 46 more standards that will be considered for future adoption. Most of these surfaced in a workshop conducted by EPRI in May of 2009. As you might expect, they cover a wide range of topics from wholesale and retail pricing to communications infrastructure to entertainment content (I'm not kidding) to numbering schemes for protective devices. In a way, this section is an acknowledgement that not all requirements are known, and so the available standards will have to grow to meet future needs. And that comes after a recognition that we don't really have everything that we need to meet today's Smart Grid Interop requirements, which is an excellent segue into next week's blog topic. There we will discuss the Priority Action Plans needed to complete the Interop Standards Framework.
Having said that, in the Humble Opinion of YHA (it is possible to interpret 2 humbles as a double negative, but I meant it as in Twice As Humble), we do have a very strong body of standards work to begin the implementation of an smart grid. Are there gaps? Sure. But, you've got to start somewhere, and I believe that Chapt 4 proves that there is a substantial foundation for going forward. As opposed to waiting until all the standards dust has settled, which won't be for a while yet. So, have faith in the existing work as a good starting point for your company's smart grid, and please join us next week for a look at the on-going efforts in the Roadmap.
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