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Embracing Disruption and Standards for the Sake of a Smart Grid
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Posted by Mark Ryland
National Standards Officer (USA)
Today is World Standards Day, a celebration whose theme this year is “Tackling climate change through standards.” I can’t help but think back a few days to a nondescript hotel conference room in a suburb of Washington, D.C. About 45 intelligent, opinionated, intense people from many industries gathered at the “invitation” (as in, “be there or else!”) of NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. Our job: work on the roadmap for the creation and evolution of a bunch of technical standards, very quickly, for the Smart Grid, the widely-anticipated computerized energy system of the future.
The Smart Grid is a vision of a secure, information-driven electrical system in which every device reports on and coordinates its power use and the system uses electric power from anywhere, including home solar panels and idle hybrid vehicles that sell extra battery power back to the grid. Realizing this vision could lower costs and increase energy efficiency. That’s why it’s not (just) a gee-whiz futuristic scenario but a major policy objective of the Obama Administration. Federal and state governments want the Smart Grid to become real really fast.
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