Love Your Smart Grid Vendor Today!
Power to the Smart Grid Vendors!
It’s impossible to create change without smart and dedicated vendors to make it happen – spoken like a true sales person!
If you have ever sold or been exposed to the sales process behind selling “infrastructure” – the transformation of the grid represents one of the most distributed, complicated and challenging landscapes that exists today! Meter counts can be in the millions, there is no “standard” neighborhood, and the control infrastructure behind the scenes varies like Monday night prime time on Fox TV! For both the IOU and Public Utility companies – this is a massive undertaking! Existing power and control infrastructure has been in place for a long, long time – so it’s like trying to go back and re-instrument and add real-time telemetry to some pretty rigid equipment. Sure, at the meter level – rip and replace works well – but on the back-end of power distribution – that is not necessarily a viable option. If you are a utility person – does the “Smart Grid” give you a headache?
The $3B+ plus funds that are available for change – certainly helps reduces the “financial” headache for the utility companies – and as long as they don’t try to pass on too much of the remaining delta to the consumer – I (as a consumer) don’t have a headache either. At the consumer level, if utilities can provide additional functionality, and I can save money, then I have a a tangible home ROI and I’m ahead of the game. That is a good thing!
If the financial assistance is there – then why is Smart Grid such a process for the Utilities? The answer: It is a distributed infrastructure that is very complex!!! And it now needs to leverage technologies and standards that might not be that familiar to the parties who are starting to drive these efforts. Oh, and did I also mention that the standards are still somewhat in flux? An example of this complexity is highlighted on the NIST Home > Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Project
Effective interoperability is built on a unifying framework of interfaces, protocols, and the other consensus standards. These standards facilitate useful interactions so that, for example, “smart” appliances and meters will tell consumers how much power they are using and at what cost, providing them with more control over their power consumption and energy bills. Widely adopted standards also will help utilities to mix and manage varying supplies of solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources and better respond to changing demand.
Starting to see how detailed and involved this market sector is? When you read about “interfaces, protocols and consensus standards” you know you’ve got some homework to do! Sure you can Google “Smart Grid IPV6″ or “Grid Mesh Networking” but there exists a collection of experts with opinions, solutions and support to help the utilities accelerate their learning curve and feel confident in initiating a Smart Grid project (or sub-project as there are many “definitions” as what actually is a Smart Grid). Who are these experts you ask?
Let me proudly introduce the Smart Grid Ecosystem of Vendors! On the above image, we see the same multi-layer architecture as before, but now mapped with the vendors offering expertise and solutions in each grid area. What you see is a mix of early stage, later stage and very well established top-tier companies – each providing a piece of the puzzle or in some cases an end-end solution. Based on what area of Smart Grid you are thinking about… which is most likely starting with FAN/AMI ( which just happens to be the more congested box in the image) there are a variety of great vendors in the market to help you get started. Let me zoom in on this box and make it easy for you…
Lots of great information, white papers, and video’s exist on these vendor websites to help anyone better understand the importance of the Smart Grid, and the enabling technology that exists to help make it a reality.
Love your Smart Grid vendor today!
[Note: My source of this image is GTM's excellent Smart Grid report which served as the basis for my previous post.]
