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.
Even before the conference started, I was talking to new people bringing their skills and knowledge to the problems of energy. Last night, I spoke for a long time with Greg Schwartz of CalConnect on the problems of coordinating activities across our daily lives, whether class schedules or energy prices, whether building systems or industrial operations. He identified his biggest problem as one of institutional awareness. CalConnect has key technical members in Oracle, Microsoft and Apple. Increased awareness is needed so that their calendar standards people will be given the time to finish the cross-cutting web services of scheduling.
The FIX Protocol consortium is here in force. FIX, a standard for financial information, provides the underpinning for the world’s major trading operations, from stock exchanges to commodities. The support and cooperation of FIX can help us get to transactional energy much faster.
Even at breakfast, I was talking to someone from the ASE, the automotive standards group. While she is here (Carolyn? - I wish I was better with names) to discuss the issues associated with electric vehicles. As the conversation continued with themes of competitiveness and knowledge drain, we turned to integration strategies. Cars have been under incredible cost and integration pressure, and have used service oriented integration of control systems to improve integration while reducing complexity. Detroit may be the place to hire engineers experienced in service oriented control integration.
George Arnold is emceeing the morning; anyone who has been following the smart grid process knows where he stands: informational interoperability, cooperation among the SDOs, and above all, speed of standards development.
Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO described the goals of the administration and how they tied to this effort. He named key overall goals of enabling technical innovation, improving global competiveness, and open government. The meme he rode the longest was "verbs not nouns". Too often new systems and new standards are nouns. "Now we have a system". "Now we have a standard." He wants us to focus on effective use of standards. How many people can use each interface. What new uses or approaches to energy use these standards?
Now I may always here the same thing, but I heard "light, loose service oriented standards" in every bit of his talk.
Well that was the first half of the morning. More later.