There is no doubt that the year-plus since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) has borne witness to a great deal of activity among the diverse groups of smart grid stakeholders. On May 18, 2009, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu declared: "The Smart Grid is an urgent national priority that requires all levels of government as well as industry to cooperate.... We still have much to do, but the ultimate result will be a much more efficient, flexible power grid and the opportunity to dramatically increase our use of renewable energy."
In the fall of 2009, the federal government announced Recovery Act awards totaling more than $4 billion to 132 smart grid projects around the country. In January 2010, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), acknowledging the need to accelerate the establishment of a "flexible, uniform and technologically neutral" set of standards to guide smart grid component vendors, published its final Phase 1 report entitled "NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 1.0." In short, the federal government has made its priorities clear.
Something Different for Everyone
The story of the blind men and the elephant has resurfaced as a popular metaphor for describing smart grid development to date. It is hard to imagine stakeholders with less in common: venture capital – backed software and technology vendors and electric utilities. The former have been entering the space in large numbers since about a year ago, offering home energy management systems (HEMS), home area networks (HANs), in-home displays (IHDs), and other Internet-age data processing and management products. The electric utilities, on the other hand, are necessarily circumspect in their approach to overhauling the grid while simultaneously delivering uninterrupted, reliable, stable electrical service.
The overall vision of a "smart" electricity grid is exhilarating: integrating software, communications, and automation technology to digitally monitor, process, and communicate massive amounts of real-time data bi-directionally, all for the purpose of reducing our energy consumption, enabling the deployment of more renewable and distributed generation energy resources, and delivering less-expensive electricity to consumers in a reliable and secure way. But given the complex realities of the grid, it’s not surprising that initial attempts at smart grid deployment have been marked by fragmentation.
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