Disintegrating the Grid and Retail Worlds

Instead of trying to integrate the grid and the retail sides of the utilities, CIOs should take the results of an essential system analysis that supports the EWPC market architecture and design breakthrough paradigm shift of the power industry.

Disintegrating the Grid and Retail Worlds

By José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.

Systemic Consultant: Electricity

Copyright © 2007 José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without written permission from José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio. Please write to javs@ieee.org to contact the author for any kind of engagement.

W. Marie Zanavich, Vice President Information Technology / CIO, Retired, has produced a very interesting piece of work to support the integration of the grid and retail sides of the utilities, based on the cumulative learning of the past 30 years in standards and process disciplines of the IT business. She concludes that “the ‘enterprise direction’ [of the CIO] should be the only one supported.”

An alternative view of the article supports the need to restructure the power industry under the EWPC market architecture and design paradigm, as can be seen in Disruptive Technologies Convergence. With EWPC most of the technology integration present challenges identified in the article disappear. By performing an essential systems analysis, to find out the real information system requirements of the power industry, I came up with the Synthesis Proposal Agreement of EWPC.

The biggest technology (compatibility and integration) issue originates in an intuitive and mistaken restructuring that separates transmission from distribution and that keeps distribution together with the retail operation in the utilities. Restructuring is in essence an information technology event, in which there are great efficiency opportunities on the customer side of the business, arising from the great reduction in transaction costs with the introduction of innovative business models to take the power industry out of the NO PROFIT ZONE, as explained in Let EWPC Come to Fruition.

In addition, serious difficulties on the integration of the grid with retail were explained in the article The Anti-System Utility. The problem is that the distribution side of the grid has been used to keep the retail side of the enterprise as a monopoly or as a powerful incumbent retailer. Those powerful retailers obstructs competition, as is the recent case of Ohio’s plan for re-regulation, as explained in the A New Mistaken Experiment and that are to be resolved with “Let the Market Decide” in Ohio.

Unlike the grid and retail side of the utility under transmission access, the integrated transmission and distribution grid, which is kept together under EWPC, has the same transportation function and the same culture under the same roof. That is why I also wrote the EWPC article Solving Smart Grid Cost Recovery to solve the difficulty that regulators have to approve AMI investment. I said above that most of the problems disappear, thinking of the great information technology challenges of implementing the smart grid.

Retail competition at the federal or global level, under prudential regulations, with Second Generation Retailer - 2GR developing business model innovations, will result in Retailers Enterprise Solutions as explained in Positive Returns under EWPC. AMI investments then will no longer be bets of regulators, but risks taken by 2GRs under competition.

Reference and context: Technology Integration Presents Challenges