Friday, June 19, 2009

EPRI Provided Crucial Input to the U.S. Smart Grid Interoperability Roadmap

NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology) released on June 18, 2009, a report that identifies issues and proposes priorities for developing technical standards and an architecture for a U.S. Smart Grid. The report is out for public review.

The nearly 300-page report, developed and delivered to NIST by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), is now publicly available:

Click HERE to download the Report [pdf, 5,7 MB].

Click HERE for the NIST press release.

A similar report has been written for the German projects "E-Energy" (the report is available in German only!):

Click HERE for more information on the German report.

The report refers to many Standards published by IEC TC 57 (Power System Management) and IEC TC 88 (Wind Power). Even this report is focusing on the U.S. power system, it is applicable for other regions as well. Contributions have come from non-U.S. experts. The IEC standards referenced in the report are TRUE International Standards.

The open review process is quite crucial because the final Roadmap will become a more or less official guideline for the whole power delivery system!

Standards like IEC 61968/70 (CIM), IEC 61850, IEC 62351, IEC 60870-6-TASE2, DNP3, IEC 61588, ... are important parts of the power system and recommended in the report to be included in the Final Roadmap. It could be expected that these standards will need extensions, and new standards may be needed as well.

The standardization work in the years to come requires that all the IEC Standardization groups closely cooperate together and with U.S. and other related standardization groups like IEEE, ISO and others. It could be expected that the resources needed for the global standardization work is at least as high as during the last 10 years.

In addition, there are several crucial regional and national R&D and other Smart Grid related projects going on, just started or planned that have also an influence on the International Standardization. It is highly recommended that the successful cooperation of U.S. activities (UCA 1.0, UCA 2.0) and e.g., the European initiated activities like IEC 61850 and IEC 61400-25 will be continued during the next decade in International Standardization!

The press release states that "NIST will use the EPRI report in drafting the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework. The NIST document will describe a high-level architecture, identify an initial set of key standards, and provide a roadmap for developing new or revised standards needed to realize the Smart Grid. Release 1.0 of the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework is planned to be available in September. 

A third public EPRI-sponsored Smart Grid interoperability-standards workshop will be held in early August to engage standards-development organizations in responding to unaddressed, high-priority needs identified in the draft standards roadmap.

Ultimately, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) determines whether sufficient consensus has been reached to implement final standards and protocols necessary for Smart Grid functionality and interoperability. NIST’s role is to identify and submit to FERC recommendations for the final product."

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