Networking the Power Grid
Figure 2: Cisco’s recently announced Home Energy Controller, their own ‘smart meter’
of last year, which sees many of its leading industry partners such as EMC, Accenture, Oracle, General Electric, Siemens and others work together to create highly secure end-to-end smart grids.
Cisco has also recently announced a number of products in its Connected Grid portfolio of smart grid solutions that will help utilities more reliably and efficiently deliver electric power from generation facilities all the way to businesses and homes. This will result in better energy management as well as economic and environmental benefits.
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_062910c.html
of secure public and private networks. For example, commercial banking is conducted over private networks. However, retail banking securely uses the public internet. Both of these networks use protocols from IP as their foundations.
Why is Cisco Looking at this Space?
Cisco is the world’s leading supplier of communications solutions. It has led and supported the development of the internet. The communications needs of the utility industry are similar to the challenges it has helped to overcome in the past, working in concert with customers and partners to develop a solution that meets active business needs. With its products and services delivered to governments, private enterprise and consumers, it is ideally suited to capture this market evolution and deliver a platform for smart grid success.
The company’s vision for smart grid is to use the network as a platform to provide an end-to-end, highly secure energy management infrastructure, all the way from energy generation to businesses and homes. This open, standards-based infrastructure will enable devices and applications for improved measurement, monitoring and management of energy demand and consumption at all levels.
The aim is to create a resilient, self-healing, highly secure and inclusive grid environment that optimally combines all the disparate sources of information in the utility environment. This scenario would allow for
The aim is to create a resilient, self-healing, highly secure and inclusive grid environment that optimally combines all the disparate sources of information in the utility environment.
effective decisions to be made and timely actions propagated to the most relevant actuation points, resulting in the smart-grid benefits that the utility firm and its consumers want.
Today, Cisco is working with a wide variety of partners to make this vision a reality. It launched its Smart Grid Ecosystem towards the end
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As part of Cisco’s Connected Grid portfolio, the new purpose-built substation routers and switches form a resilient, manageable and highly secure network solution to integrate IP-based communications with the power grid for intelligent grid monitoring and control. In addition, with Cisco’s energy management services, utilities can manage data from thousands of homes while having the back-end fully integrated. Consumers, on the other hand, are given insight into and control over peripheral devices that communicate via the Cisco Home Energy
Although smart-grid communications assist in transforming the energy industry, they also introduce the need for an integrated security infrastructure.
Controller (see Figure 2), such as thermostats, intelligent sockets and ultimately appliances such as refrigerators and water heaters. This gives end-users more power over their energy consumption.
A number of private and public organisation are already working on a number of in-depth pilot projects with Cisco in Europe and the US, including Duke Energy, FP&L, Yello Strom and E.ON, as well as the City of Amsterdam on an Urban EcoMap.
Conclusion
Current electricity systems around the world are neither efficient nor sustainable. Power outages, which are common in some developing countries, have the potential to spread to the rest of the world if measures are not taken to make electricity supply more reliable and resource efficient.
Governments, industries and experts around the world agree that smart grids are the solution to the evolving energy challenge. While in theory the smart grid vision is taking shape, in practice the technological architecture for smart grids is still being investigated. Cisco’s vision is to put the network at the heart of the smart-grid strategy. It believes that open standards and interoperability are key for making the smart grid vision a reality. IP and pervasive broadband networks will often be at the centre of this infrastructure. IP is the key system as it is flexible and resilient enough to cope with the demands of security, transparent information flow and interoperability required by the grid. n
MODERN ENERGY REVIEW – VOLUME 2 ISSUE 2
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