Introduction
The electric grid has a long history and foundation of standards that began with the formation of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in 1884. Within a year of its founding several technical committees were formed including one tasked with establishing standard names for electrical and other units.
Common names and terminology were part of the foundation of grid standards – this enabled the development and commercialization of products that produced and consumed electricity by allowing them to interoperate on the grid at the defined frequency, voltage, and power boundaries. The same holds true today – common and standard terminology is an important attribute to unleash innovation on the grid. Over the last couple of decades, information technology (IT) is increasingly being used on the grid. Electric utilities are able to extend their communication infrastructures to reach more connected devices, sensors, meters, resources, and other stakeholders beyond their own enterprise. Standard languages are just as important today as they were in the beginning to enable development of connected devices that can produce or consume electricity more intelligently to help balance electricity supply and demand.
Three Attributes of Standards to Enable Innovation:
What attributes of standards enable innovation? An early example is the electric plug and socket standard. Its attributes enabled innovation and allowed rapid development of derivative products and fostered radical changes in performance from those derivative products. This ‘interface’ of sorts was designed without knowledge of the future devices which would eventually utilize this plug/socket design and become standard in every home and building with similar standards around the world.
| Attribute #1: | Unlimited use The standard electrical plug/outlet was designed without knowing what would be plugged into it nor what the source of electricity would be. Beyond the basic physical and electrical boundaries, any new product needing power can be developed to get power from this plug. |
| Attribute #2: | Open and unrestricted access (to utilize the standard) The National Electric Manufacturer’s Association (NEMA) 5-15R is the standard outlet used in the United States – the standard is accessible and, within the bounds of the standard, anyone can use it. |
| Attribute #3: | Anyone can benefit The standard itself has minimal boundaries and does not prohibit the production of new and innovative products because the standard doesn’t specify how it should be used (within the boundaries of physical and electrical parameters). |
The standard plug/outlet, in its simplicity, enabled the development and commercialized products that could benefit from consuming electricity.
EPRI, along with utility membership and stakeholder engagement have contributed to standards efforts for the utility industry for decades in many disciplines, e.g. actual operation methods and techniques, electrical, mechanical, chemical, metallurgical, IT and telecommunications. Some of the earliest IT standards were in the original Utility Communications Architecture (UCA) with one of the emerging standards being the Inter-Control Center Communications Protocol (ICCP) or IEC 60870-6. ICCP is used almost exclusively for messaging between control centers worldwide and became critical to support the operation of interconnected grids and electricity markets.
Utilities use a combination of standards, be those defacto standards or national/internationally developed and approved e.g. DNP3, IEC 61850, CIM, Multispeak, IP, and the list goes on and on. Why do we use standards? To have flexibility to pick and choose products and tools that address the ever changing business needs with the most affordable cost to achieve and sustain the required business solutions.
More times than not, the business requirements and needs drive utilities to look for interoperability across multiple solution providers to enable interchangeability of a solution, product or tool which helps reduce the costs to achieve sustainability across the business needs. This is important because the lifetime of individual solutions can vary and new solutions will be added or replaced that must co-exist with legacy systems. Having solution providers that utilize standard protocols simplifies interchangeability from one solution to the next.
Standards conformance testing is also critical to make sure solutions deployed will indeed do what is claimed. One may assume that if a solution is utilizing a standard, it will interoperate with another solution using the same standard, but unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Standards may have different versions or a variety of options or use profiles that are valid, but if different from one system to the next, they will not interoperate among different systems. Conformance testing and certification is a process that validates solutions utilizing a particular standard will interoperate with another certified solution using the same standard.
Security is another critical component of standards that must be architected, designed or built into the products and tools. The appropriate level and use of cyber security should not be considered as an afterthought add-on, though many times it could be necessary when transitioning from what is currently deployed to what a more desirable solution design might be to preserve legacy systems during the transition.
Application of IT Standards for an Integrated Grid
As we look back at some examples of history and attributes of standards that enable innovation, we can compare them to changes happening today in the electric power system. One example is the rise of distributed energy resources (DER), such as solar photovoltaics (PV) connected to the distribution system. In many settings, these distributed resources already affect the grid and their projected expansion may significantly change the technical, operational, environmental, and financial character of the electricity sector. EPRI refers to this as the ‘Integrated Grid’ and has begun work on an initiative that has several facets including the application of standards. As IT is increasingly being utilized and combined with electric grid to enhance operations, the development of the IT-related standards such as OpenADR 2.0b can play an important role in connecting and managing DER on the distribution system.
The convergence of IT and operational technology (OT) offers the promise of improving automation in a variety of areas. Today, most DER deployed is not managed, whether it is a PV system or a load, and standards can be a key enabler to foster innovation and automation of DER to support the grid just as the ICCP protocol enabled interoperability on a regional basis.
Does OpenADR offer attributes of a standard that may foster innovation and automation? Here is a quick analysis of OpenADR and attributes that may enable innovation:
| Attribute #1: | Unlimited use The OpenADR standard is primarily focused on the physical attributes of resources – it doesn’t need to know what type of resource it is, but rather its electrical characteristics (load dispatch set point, load control capacity, charge state, etc.) Whether the resource is a generator, load, microgrid, building, vehicle, battery or something we haven’t thought of, it is applicable. |
| Attribute #2: | Open and unrestricted access The standard is based on the OASIS Energy Interop and is available on the OpenADR web-site – free to the public. Open access to the standards enables others to develop products that interoperate, are interchangeable and support required cyber security requirements. |
| Attribute #3: | Anyone can benefit Because it is a public standard, anyone can produce products that meet the specification and go through the OpenADR Alliance certification process. EPRI has even developed OpenADR 2.0b open source software to evaluate the standard in our demonstrations as well as for use by other innovators. |
OpenADR 2.0b appears to be aligned with attributes to enable innovation, but it is still early in its maturity. Products are just now being certified and projects and demonstrations are just getting underway that will help to understand how it may get adopted and enable innovation.
It is important to include a transparent standards development process in this convergence of IT and OT systems of the electric grid and consider the needs of all stakeholders – producers, consumers, and innovators. Industry feedback and contributions will ensure we minimize use of proprietary interfaces that require customization and prohibit innovation in this important time in the history of the grid. By developing the right standards, we can ensure the electric grid enables innovation for another 100 plus years.
About the Authors
Matt Wakefield is Director of Information and Communication Technologies at the Electric Power Research Institute. He has over 25 years of experience in the electric industry and his responsibilities include furthering the development of a modernized grid through application of standards, communication technology, integration, and cyber security.
Ron Cunningham is an IT Enterprise Architect at American Electric Power with 40 years experience in the electric utility industry with the last 34 years in Information Technology providing general engineering application development and support, customer system support, computer/telecommunications research and development, Internet/intranet web-enabled services/support, security, including the last 24 years in IT Architecture and the last 6 years focused on the smart grid both on internal AEP SG projects and OpenSG and SGIP PAPs and SGAC work efforts.
References
1 http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/History_of_Institute_of_Electrical_and_Electronic_Engineers_(IEEE)_Standards
2 http://www.nema.org/Standards/Pages/Wiring-Devices-Dimensional-Specifications.aspx
3 http://www.epri.com/Our-Work/Pages/Integrated-Grid.aspx
4 http://www.openadr.org/specification
5 https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=energyinterop
6 http://www.openadr.org/
7 http://sourceforge.net/projects/openadr2vtn/ & http://sourceforge.net/projects/openadr2bven-pull/
8 http://www.openadr.org/certified-products
