A new book has just been published on Smart Grid—so why should technology and business leaders and Smart Grid change agents be interested? The Advanced Smart Grid: Edge Power Driving Sustainability, by co-authors Andres Carvallo and John Cooper, provides practical “how-to” guidance, using a first-hand, insider’s perspective to explore the advent and evolution of Smart Grids in the 21st century (referred to as “Smart Grid 1.0”).
This book offers an expansive perspective on Smart Grid that emphasizes the importance of planning and design to accommodate a multitude of use cases and Smart Grid requirements. It also provides a detailed explanation of how an advanced Smart Grid will incorporate demand response with smart appliances and how management mechanisms may be employed to integrate distributed energy resources (energy efficiency, distributed generation, energy storage, and electric vehicles).
The Advanced Smart Grid uses the design and construction of the first municipal utility Smart Grid in the United States as a case study, sharing the many successes and lessons learned, providing readers with a working knowledge of the successful tools and best practices needed to overcome diverse technological and organizational challenges as they strive to build a next-generation advanced Smart Grid (referred to as “Smart Grid 2.0”). Further, this unique book offers a glimpse at the future with interconnected advanced Smart Grids and a redesigned energy ecosystem (referred to as “Smart Grid 3.0”).
The Advanced Smart Grid will help smart grid change agents and energy and technology visionaries expand their Smart Grid vision, providing a broader lens that will lead readers to view the Smart Grid as a more comprehensive value proposition than is often talked about in the press. The Smart Grid has the potential to transform the utility organization and enable a full integration of new energy, information and communication technologies with less effort and cost. Success in a Smart Grid project will require information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) professionals to work together effectively and productively, and utility business processes will need to be adjusted to accommodate a transition from relatively independent silos to an integrated energy ecosystem.
Beyond providing a more expansive vision of the Smart Grid, this massive modernization effort will provide utilities new business opportunities and new ways to leverage technological innovations. Utilities will use some technologies to operate their grid more efficiently, reducing their need for power and deferring significant capital projects for new generation or expansion of distribution grid capacity, avoiding some outages and shortening others, and increasing power reliability. Utilities will also use other technologies to gather far more detailed data on energy consumption, and then mine that data to reveal insights on how consumers use the grid, how to gain more value from electricity, and how to help reduce peak loads and improve utility profitability. Finally, utilities will increasingly be drawn to add more distributed energy resources to their portfolios, opening the door to new business models, specifically compelling new energy services by utilities or third parties who collaborate with utilities.
But transitioning to smart grids is not without its challenges, which show up on multiple fronts to confound utilities. A key challenge will concern maintaining reliability and continuity of service while upgrading to a Smart Grid. Ensuring physical and cyber security and interoperability with legacy and new technologies, even as interoperability standards are under development, creates a need for new skill sets and rapid adaptation to an increasingly dynamic environment. Making investment decisions on technologies at varying levels of maturity in tight economic times, when access to capital is constrained and when rate case recovery of Smart Grid investments is uncertain, requires a new level of technology and financial management. It will be increasingly important to consider and investigate ways of mitigating risks and costs, such as adopting new virtualization and cloud computing methodologies. Data mining and analysis become areas of focus in the post implementation phase that will benefit a utility’s operations and customers. It all adds up to a fundamentally new way of doing business, where Smart Grids will require new business models, process improvement, staffing, training, and even regulatory treatment to extract maximum benefits.
The current pace of Smart Grid deployment can be expected to accelerate over the coming years, as the inexorable march of lower prices and enhanced functionality, as well as ever increasing demands for more consumer empowerment combine to drive the adoption of the smart grid and related Smart Grid technologies. The adoption of this advanced Smart Grid vision may be seen as an inevitable transition, because consumers will demand ever more value and independence with regard to energy, just as they have already demanded in the evolution of IT and telecom. Two principal drivers—Moore’s Law (“Digital devices get ever cheaper even as they become more functional.”) and Metcalfe’s Law (“Networks grow increasingly valuable the larger they get.”) —accelerate Smart Grid adoption. As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details;” this book provides leaders with valuable tools and insights to manage all those details and realize their Smart Grid visions.
The Advanced Smart Grid: Edge Power Driving Sustainability is now available for purchase at the publisher’s website here, and will be available on Amazon.com and in leading bookstores by July 21.
John Cooper, co-author of The Advanced Smart Grid, has recently joined the team at UtiliPoint and its sister company, Consonus, to further the goals and realize the vision he developed over the last 15 years as a Smart Grid pioneer and innovator, captured in this compelling and highly useful new book. John may be reached directly by email at jcooper@utilipoint.com.
