The Emerging SmartGrid

This is a suggestion for the SmartGrid Readiness blog to restrict its attention to the emergent SmartGrid transportation (T&D) only utility, under an EWPC EPAct.

The Emerging SmartGrid

By José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.
Systemic Consultant: Electricity

First posted in the GMH Blog, on December 29th, 2008.

Copyright © 2008 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. This article is an unedited, an uncorrected, draft material of The EWPC Textbook. Please write to javs@ieee.org to contact the author for any kind of engagement.

I welcome Sachin Kumar’s SmartGrid Readiness blog post SmartGrid - real or fiction?,” but show below that for the SmartGrid to emerge, that is to become real, the whole Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) paradigm needs to die. In that light, his aim to “… conceptualize how DERs and PHEVs along with Smart homes would rule the power grid,” each of those disruptive technologies should be an integral part of the emerging whole paradigm.

Sachin said “I think the starting point has to be a discovery exercise in order to find out where does a utility stand now in terms of various decision support and human interfacing IT applications it has.” As can be seen in the EWPC article Leadership Answers What to do First (please hit the hyperlink here and below), I suggested that “The answer to the question of what to do first is for the global power industry to get out of the wrong jungle to produce a EWPC based EPAct as soon as possible. That is the kind of leadership needed to face the inevitable fundamental changes required to significantly reduce today’s legislative and regulatory uncertainty.”

In the EWPC article The Smart Grid Transportation Utility can be seen that “Dramatic and radical change is coming to the electric utility industry as the utility itself evolves to the smart transportation [T&D only] grid, under a complete rethinking of the electric industry. Front and back office generation and customer facing activities become free market activities under prudential regulations.”

As can also be seen in the EWPC article Renewable Power and Smart Grid as Parts of a Whole, “It is argued that the smart grid is not the lifeline of renewable power. Instead, what’s holding both is the Investor Owned Utility paradigm.” So, it should not wonder that according to Sachin IOUs “…still seem to be struggling with their circuit maps, asset data, load flows, outage management, VAR management, billing systems, meter management (meters go missing from the billing database!), etc.,” because they are not fit to be working on SmartGrid plans. The entity that should be working on the plans is the new SmartGrid transportation (transmission and distribution) only utility, as envisioned in the EWPC paradigm.