Notes on SmartGrid Domain Experts Workgroup, NIST, August 5, 2008
NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) started by making a strong claim for ownership in this area, citing Title XIII, 1305 of EISA 2007. NIST set out an aggressive agenda including a preliminary report at GridWeek on 9/24 and a NIST workshop on developing standards at Grid Interop in Atlanta November 11-13.
NIST wants to have in place tight working relationships with the target SDO’s (Standards Development Organizations) in place before 2009. NIST and the GridWise Architectural Council are working together to direct the standards direction toward e-commerce and interactions with building operations and with the building occupants. Some of these standards will be e-commerce focused, some will be looking to the Building Information Models, and to the energy models they support. I am excited that this might push these design approaches into continuing use during operations.
B2G Breakout (Building to Grid)
We quickly agreed that goal of the SmartGrid standardization efforts is to design the information exchange and informational interoperability to enable healthy markets to emerge around energy use in buildings. Success was defined as enabling buildings to trade their energy.
The group was in violent agreement that we needed to work on business to business interactions, and not on machine to machine interactions. Services inside the building would be coordinated by the business processes of the occupants. Grid messages would go to the business agent of the occupants. Interactions, including pricing and bidding, would be between the grid agents and the building agents.
But market development for what? The problems that need solving quickly include real time pricing and automated demand response. The solutions should encourage the development of distributed generation and local energy storage. The Pricing Models and Buying Models for Energy should also work inside microgrids such as the building or neighborhood.
We spent a considerable time defining the characteristics of live pricing. There was intense interest in moving beyond static prices to curves, i.e., if the prices move like this tomorrow, I will commit to energy consumption in a curve that looks like that. Automated contract execution and on-line exchange of tariffs are both desired.
One thing that everyone agreed is that automated metering infrastructure would never meet its potential unless full live real-time access to all meter information is made available from *both* sides of the meter should be the standard. Parties could then collect the data in accord with the schedule that made sense to them.
This has been about the business exchange – soon I will write about the attributes of these transactions and product differentiation on the grid.