The electricity sector remains an industry that is driven mostly by regulation and capital expenditure. With customers still being mostly captive, the drivers for change are less intense. This probably explains why, for so many years, the market for technology in the electrical sector was mostly large industrial companies providing products to large utility companies. The progress towards new technologies was measured and incremental as the prevailing feeling was that we had mastered electricity a century ago, and life was more about marginal improvements than about hunting for breakthrough innovation.

Asset management technology? Well, with the PUC’s imposing rates of return based mostly on CAPEX depreciation, it made more sense to just replace assets than to try to extend their useful life. The biggest change in the last decades was probably the FERC ORDER 888 and 889 that enabled wholesales markets. This led to the establishment of

ISO / RTO and power trading desks, creating a fresh need for new technology.

The arrival of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) should have imposed the need to have a more holistic view of the technology required, but the reality on the ground is that the industry tends to identify and build all its technology needs based mostly on pilot projects… or on a committee looking at mostly only one aspect or issue at a time.

It is only in the last 10 years that it became obvious something big was afoot, and a market, where value which had been based on resource ownership, or infrastructure ownership or being a large utility, was beginning to be profoundly disrupted by technology.

And it was not the kind of technology that the long-established, large industrial companies were used to providing to utilities. It was technology that empowered the consumer.

Residential DIY solar panels began to appear around 2005. Tesla launched its Roadster in 2008. Nissan launched its LEAF in 2010, and by 2012 was already deploying “LEAF-to-home” in Japan. By 2013, it was clear that utilities were caught in the gradually tightening vise of declining revenues caused by increasing customer self-generation and increasing grid investment requirements to accommodate electric vehicle “hotspots.”

Toss into the mix, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and the emergence of IoT and the smart home, and the basic parameters of a distribution grid that is distributed, digitized and decarbonized begins to emerge. This new grid is a mix of behind-the-meter consumer investment and in-front-of-the-meter utility investment with a topping of new business models. The homeowner and the prosumer-centric load-serving entity (utility, ESCO, CCA, etc.) can now have a new, more balanced, business relationship that equitably shares the benefits of the two-way power flows and the respective investments made on both sides of the meter.

A very neat win-win package from the business point of view but can it work technically? Very few homes have an electrical engineer “on staff” to be the counterpart to the utility. So where is the “brain” the “intelligent assistant”, the “operating system” - that is available 24/7/365 to talk to the utility distribution management systems? And this is a relationship between a giant and a flea. The media world was moving from broadcast TV to peer-to-peer programming – but could electric distribution go there? Was there the breakthrough technology, desired by, and affordable to consumers, that could make this work?

This was an intriguing challenge for a new generation of innovation companies that decided to breach the competitive barriers that had been built around this, one of the largest business sectors in the world, and to take this on this very demanding, high-risk moonshot. The game was on.

We’re now in 2020, and the answer to the prosumer-facing side of the challenge is being worked on and solved by several companies. These companies are using either conventional or exotic materials in their power electronics and conventional or breakthrough designs for the constant conversion and reconversion of AC to DC, DC to AC and DC to DC. Solutions are a mix of hardware, embedded software and/or cloud computing. Some products are reaching commercial launch.

But what about the utility-facing side of the challenge? Have the issues been properly identified and met? Let’s explore this further.

One of the first issues is communications protocols. Many of the protocols were developed within industry silos, and as the EV, residential solar power and smart home industries converge with the legacy electrical distribution sector, we find ourselves in a Tower of Babel. At the highest level, the utility DMS communication with EVs, EV chargers and aggregators may meet IEEE 2030.5 and Open ADR 2.0b.

Even at this level, we can get conflicting instructions between demand (charge my EV more quickly) and demand response (curtail some load). Move one level down, and the number of protocols begins to explode with multiple protocols for demand response, solar inverter management (Rule 21, for example), distributed stationary storage, EV charging management (OCPP 2.0, for example) and EV discharging management (V2G). It has been 20 years since the first publication, and we are still having problems turning IEC 61850 into a real standard, and many players are still using ICCP and DNP3 as main protocols. The industry needs to get its [deleted] together. Multiple protocols add up to multiple points of weakness, and this segues nicely into the second issue: Security.

The utility industry is not amused by toys. Ten “fast,” bi-directional residential DC chargers on a feeder can swing power on a feeder by half a MW in five milliseconds. Safe, reliable feeder management requires communication and control between the utility DMS and the behind-the-meter assets on the feeder. No open ports to give hackers a backdoor to the network and encrypted communications throughout. Regulations have not yet caught up to the technology, but compliance with NERC/CIP standards and the use of TPM hardware encryption chips look like the way forward. The grid will only be as strong as its weakest point.

One of the many benefits of this new bi-directional grid for the utility is better feeder load forecasting. When the distribution grid was only consumers, forecasting a feeder load for the hours and days ahead at an acceptable level of accuracy was relatively straight forward. With the appearance of the prosumer, adding both generation and storage behind the meter, and the appearance EVs which can randomly pop up anywhere on the network, forecasting accuracy has been lost, and the costs of standby reserve and dealing with over-generation have significantly increased.

Up to now, the smart devices behind the meter were “worm-brain smart.” And it is only with this leap forward in advanced control, censoring and processing hardware, powerful algorithms, sophisticated grid edge and cloud computing, big data architectures and artificial intelligence that we see the emergence of a worthy behind-the-meter counterpart that begins to make sense to the utility industry.

And it couldn’t come at a better moment.

There is a lot of talk these days about reducing carbon emissions to fight global warming. But the appearance and adoption of attitudes, behaviors and technologies that reduce or limit carbon emissions are fragmented, and uptake is slow.

Can something be done to change this? Is there a catalyst to achieve the mass adoption of something that makes a difference? Something that “moves the needle?”

From a technology point of view, it means that we need to provide people a better option for what they currently have. This option must not impose any compromise to quality of life, and people who adopt it must see a lower cost compared to whatever they are doing or using now. Residential solar power and electric mobility are both promising areas for significant reductions in carbon emissions, but something is still holding people back, preventing their adoption at a scale that makes a difference. Until now.

Single-family suburban residences, which combine domestic energy use and the propensity for higher automobile use, provide a convenient way to involve many individuals and families in carbon footprint reduction. Given the size of suburbs around medium and large size cities everywhere in the world, a breakthrough, new solution, strongly supported and promoted by the utility industry, would certainly have the possibility of making a substantial difference in the fight against climate change.

Under this scenario:

• The Load-Serving Entity (utility, ESCO, CCA, etc.) is prosumer-centric promoting a win-win vision of the next-generation electric distribution grid.
   
• The homeowner is transformed into a smart and active partner in a next-generation electric network that is distributed, digitized, and decarbonized.
   
• The family electric vehicle is now an important home energy asset that reduces consumption charges and powers the family home during grid outages.
   
• The sun partially or fully powers the home and charges the car.
   
• The homeowner and the load-serving entity have a bidirectional business relationship that equitably shares the benefits of the two-way power flows and the respective investments made on both sides of the meter.

The smart home starts with smart energy – good for the family, good for the community and good for the planet!