Markets and Innovation

Collaborative Energy: Smart Grids and Intelligent Buildings together

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Intelligent energy use acquires energy at the right time at the right price for the right reason. Intelligent buildings provide customer amenities and customer services at the right time. Collaborative energy works with the smart grid to minimize the incompatibilities of these two problem sets. Systems on the grid and in the building need to do a better job of sharing information to improve the performance of these functions.

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Smart buildings are more important than smart grids

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Smart operations in transmission and distribution won’t help us much. An upgrade for utility operations is long overdue, especially if energy distribution gets over its severe case of not-invented-here. This upgrade may be absolutely necessary for the grid to support more dynamic energy markets, ones that will balance electricity supply and demand. The most important smart interactions will come from the grid’s end nodes: industry, commercial buildings and homes. To get the benefits of the smart grid, we must have smart load...

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The price of energy

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It was a busy week at the smart grid SDO conference. I was working with three of what the smart grid roadmap (www.nist.gov/smartgrid) calls Priority Action Plans (PAPs). These action plans are schedule, price, and messages for Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER). The technology of the grid is harder, and riskier, but these standards are what will give them a path to market. These standards will define the competition to make products in the end nodes of the grid. By the middle of next year, we will have three key standards out of this process.

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Monday Morning at the Smart Grid SDO Workshop

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Seven pre-meetings and a plenary into this workshop, it already feels like I have been here for a week. It has come a long way; everyone from the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the state-side National Association or Regulatory and Utility Commissioners (NARUC) is on the same message. Smart grid interoperability standards must provide a platform for innovation. We must support more players and new entrants into energy markets. We must not make decisions in one domain that constrain the other domains...
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