Smart Grid Library

As the US Congressional representatives head home to their respective districts, some of which defy all logic in terms of that contortionist geography called gerrymandering, it’s a perfect opportunity to attend their town hall meetings to offer advice in support of Smart Grid initiatives.   Support a national energy policy that encourages development of clean and [...]

Smart Grid technologies that enable integration of renewable sources of energy and energy storage into the distribution grid, along with new energy management software solutions, are propelling the deployment of microgrids in college and business campuses and military bases.  The Smart Grid Dictionary 3rd Edition defines a microgrid as a small power system that integrates [...]

We take electricity for granted.  In the USA and other developed nations, we are wired up with electricity that is readily available.  Blackouts are infrequent, notwithstanding causes based in natural disasters or human error.   But for the 1.4 billion humans who have no access to electricity, every day is a blackout.  Another billion have unreliable [...]

If you pose the question, “What keeps you awake at night?” to people at Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, or many utility resources in this country, you’ll get an answer about securing the grid.  Physical security concentrates on protecting assets from tampering and destruction – like transmission lines, vital substations, and the equipment that [...]

 There are two schools of thought about how the Smart Grid will evolve.  One promotes a “system of systems” view, in which the current centralized structure continues to be the dominant model, and the other focuses on an interconnected network of microgrids.  There are pros and cons to each approach, but just like the old [...]

My mother is writing a book.  She learned how to use a computer, and has been diligently crafting her story chapter by chapter.  If only the local electric grid would cooperate.  A single power disruption of a few seconds wiped out an entire chapter of her book.  Now she is reworking a previous version and [...]

My blog dated April 19 focused on PG&E activities that seemed to be designed to kill the spirit and the objectives of the Smart Grid.  Since then, PG&E has admitted that mistakes were made in some meter installs (although my PG&E smart meter functions perfectly, thank you very much), the tariff change is wending its way [...]

Microgrids are natural innovation zones for the Smart Grid because they have experimentation scalability and flexibility.  Smart utilities could create partnerships with academic and business campuses in their territories to deploy microgrids and study the most effective solutions for management of distributed generation.  Why distributed generation?  Because smart utilities should leverage the abilities of microgrids [...]

The latest electric vehicle (EV) or plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV) announcements from Detroit deliver good and bad news.  While the Chevy Volt may not actually give the average driver 230 miles per gallon, it is certainly much better than the current fleet.  I’m pleased with that news.  However, recent announcements that GM and other manufacturers – [...]

I posed two questions last week to a number of Smart Grid-related groups organized within LinkedIn®.  The questions were:  “What do you consider to be the most important security challenges in protecting consumer data in a HEMS application, and what are the most important privacy challenges?”  I asked this question because this n application will [...]