The first half of 2009 has been a wild ride for the smart grid, as this wonky electric industry dream has gone mainstream, complete with a presidential shout-out in a major economic speech and a super bowl commercial. Last week brought a slew of smart grid news.
On May 18, networking giant Cisco announced plans to enter the smart grid infrastructure market, which it expects to grow to over $20 billion a year within the next five years.
That same day, the Department of Energy announced that it would modify its plans to distribute the $4.5 billion in smart grid stimulus funds, by raising the cap on individual investment grants from $20 million to $200 million, and for demonstration projects from $40 million to $100 million. Industry players had argued that the previous caps weren't large enough to support large scale end-to-end deployments. The final guidelines are expected to be released June 17.
In the same announcement, NIST released 16 smart grid interoperability standards, the product of the first Smart Grid Interoperability Conference held April 28th and 29th. These standards, mostly governing cybersecurity and home area networks, were the low-hanging fruit of what promises to be a contentious standards-development process. That work continued at the second workshop last week--PG&E's Next100 blog has a good description of what these workshops involve, and Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech has a rundown on the accelerated timeline for smart grid standards development. Title 13 of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which laid out the legislative framework for this process, calls for FERC to adopt these standards in a rulemaking once the NIST process has developed "sufficient consensus." If you want an inside glimpse of the process, check out the standards conference's wiki.
The day after the DOE/NIST announcement, FERC requested supplemental comments (pdf) on its Smart Grid Policy Statement--initial comments were due May 2nd--to address steps the Commission might take in assisting utilities applying for DOE Smart Grid funds. Noting that the DOE's draft Funding Opportunity Announcement calls for applicants to identify and confirm funding sources for proposed projects, the Commission seeks input "how it should address requests for rate recovery that may be necessary for public utilities to qualify for awards," and whether a conditional approval may be useful. Comments on that Notice are due June 2nd.
Smart grid is smart: yes. Is it what we need? Maybe. DG (distributed generation) is brilliant and I think smart grid can play a really important role in that.
Lets think big. Really big. Are you thinking yet? Double that size by 100. Got it? Good.
MEGAGRID
You alluded to it in your previous post http://www.renewnewengland.com/2009/05/know-your-neighbors-the-lower-churchill-project.html. There is a project in Europe/North Africa that is being proposed by the DESERTEC Foundation and supported by HRH of Jordan. Check out their site here: http://www.desertec.org. It seeks to connect the powerhouse that is Europe with facilities across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East via DC lines.
We should be thinking Megagrid and Smart Grid. Mexico For Solar/wind and Canada for Hydro/Others. Wouldn't that be the perfect NAFTA?
Posted by: Nik | May 28, 2009 at 11:24 AM