Renewable energy, as necessitated by global warming and the exhaustion of cheap fossil fuels, changes the structure of the energy industry. Power plants are smaller and cleaner and come in greater variety. Energy consumption, production, and various forms of energy storage (plug-in hybrids, pumped hydro) must be co-ordinated. Co-generation of electricity with heat, microgrids, networks satisfying special energy needs (high availability electricity) will be much more common than today.

The electric grid, which was until now a one-way network transporting electricity from a few large power suppliers to many individual consumers, must become an intelligent network. The combination of modern information technology with the power grid has been called the ``smart grid'' (see e.g. www.smartgridnews.com or ``intelligrid''

Intelligrid Slide Show

The smart grid is an important emerging industry. The paper http://climatesolutions.org/pubs/pdfs/PoweringtheSmartGrid.pdf argues that the Pacific Northwest should try to become a concentration area for it.

IBM is organizing an Intelligent Utilities Network, and HP, GE, Oracle and others the Smart Energy Alliance.

The IEC TC57 Standards are expensive to download, but here is a Summary, and here a White Paper on Security Policy.

The intelligrid consortium has designed an Architecture based on these standards, formalized in a big UML 1.4 file that can be read with the (free as in beer) Magicdraw Reader Version 9.5

Regarding the debates in Utah, look at the public comments in www.psc.utah.gov/misc/Indexes/0699903NDX.htm.

Birds of Feather Session about the Smart Grid at the Utah Open Source Conference Friday Sep 7 2007, organized by Hans G. Ehrbar. Here we can discuss next steps: creating an organization with web site and mailing list, approach prominent individual in the OS Community and open source projects which can become part of this project (zope?, great emphasis on security), build individual components of this project (smart appliances communicating with a smart meter in your home), build a foundation, co-operate with faculty at CS Departments teaching the smart grid, co-operation with IT businesses willing to sell smart-grid services to the electric utilities.

Here is a proposal how to raise investment funds for the smart grid: by involving the electricity consumers themselves: If consumers are willing to use advanced techniques in their homes to conserve, store, and generate electricity, it is proposed that they should be given the option to invest in an advanced electric meter and to electronically transmit the metering information to the electric utility company using their own internet connections. Since the electric utility company saves the labor time presently needed for meter reading, such remotely-read meters should result in diminished rates which give the consumers a guaranteed return on their investment over a five to ten year timespan.

Upcoming Opportunities

Autovation conference brings all the suppliers of smart grid technology together in Reno, NV Sep 30 - Oct 3 2007

2007 Plone Conference takes place in Naples, Italy. Plone is deeply involved with Zope, and Italy is one of the pioneering countries where every electric meter is a 2-way smart meter. Good opportunity to talk to the Italian OS community about the smart grid.

This page here has the URL http://gaia.econ.utah.edu/planning/seminar/smart-grid/

Hans G. Ehrbar, Assoc. Professor of Economics at University of Utah, (801) 581 7797, ehrbar@lists.econ.utah.edu