The nation’s electric power grid is one of the best avenues of commerce for as long as it existed. Those wires running down the street, or underground in your neighborhood, are responsible for more than $350 billion in sales each year. It’s secure, reliable and – judging by recent weather events – can be practically destroyed and rebuilt in short order. In a more basis understanding on how useful electricity or the power of energy without it our world wouldn’t be the same or make nothing at all. Electricity is not a luxury, but a necessity to sustain and stabilize people’s lives, the economy, and other factors on a global scale.  For example, without electricity, our home ad anything inside it would not work. The markets that we get our food would be closed. Most people, even I sometimes take it for granted, but if we take a second a think of 15 minutes without electricity is equal to a man with no brain or a being with no soul.

So how does nation’s electric power grid work?  Well here is how we all come about to have a share of that electricity in our home and business:

Electricity relies on an interconnected system that is composed of three distinct elements, as described below and illustrated by Figure 1:

1. Generation facilities—including approximately 5,800 major power plants and numerous other smaller generation facilities;²  
2. High-voltage transmission lines—a network of over 450,000 miles that connects generation facilities with major population centers;³ and
3. Local distribution systems that bring electric power into homes and businesses via overhead lines or underground cables. The first two elements are usually referred to as the bulk power system.

 

The United States’ system of generation, transmission and distribution facilities was built over the course of a century. Centralized electric generating plants with local distribution networks were started in the 1880s and the grid of interconnected transmission lines was started in the 1920s. Today, we have a complex patchwork system of regional and local power plants, power lines and transformers that have widely varying ages, conditions, and capacities.

What are the PROs and CONs?

CONs

The aging of equipment explains some of the equipment failures that lead to intermittent failures in power quality and availability. The capacity of equipment explains why there are some bottlenecks in the grid that can also lead to brownouts and occasional blackouts. These concerns make it critical to understand what investments may be needed to keep the system in a state of good repair, and what implications any shortfall could have on the nation’s economy.

It’s also operated mainly by proprietary hardware, telecommunications, and software platforms that make it more expensive to run than it should be.
So how do we make the grid simpler to operate, and less costly? Interoperability.

Just like your laptop can operate with devices from many manufacturers interchangeably, the electrical grid of the future needs to be able to exchange data with different devices from many manufacturers locally in the field.

Unfortunately, many utilities are “siloed” by proprietary technologies that backhaul data to a centralized hub such as a head end server. Without cross-industry collaboration and tactile evaluation of device interoperability in the field, support for the technology requirements to realize the potential benefits will never occur.

Duke Energy has initiated research projects to build and deploy low-cost controllers in the lab and in the field to better manage the electric grid. This requires building a field message bus to exchange data between assets.
This data exchange can only happen if these devices are connected either through wired or wireless technologies. Once connected, the data exchange is facilitated by non-proprietary protocols and open standards – always keeping data privacy and security at the forefront.

Obviously, non-proprietary protocols and open standards sound easy enough. But every company has its own “secret sauce” that must work only with all the other secret stuff they make. It’s one of the main challenges to the concept of the internet of things.

In this proof of concept, Duke Energy is using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT). The OASIS MQTT standardization process is making MQTT an open, simple and lightweight standard protocol for M2M telemetry data communication. Implementations of a field message bus and distributed intelligence applications for the electric grid have the potential to enable interoperability at a low cost and to achieve significant cost savings. These savings are attributed to improved operational performance, faster response times, and better management of distributed energy resources (DER) and utility-owned devices.

The key to unlocking these values is for utilities and vendors to implement a standards-based, interoperable field message bus that facilitates the translation and sharing of relevant local data between disparate assets. This will enable the development of distributed intelligence applications to enhance the performance of existing centrally managed systems.

http://www.asce.org/Infrastructure/Failure-to-Act/Electricity-Infrastructure-Report-Executive-Summary/

Plugging interoperability into the nation’s electric grid