By Kevin Cornish, Enspiria

The smart grid has become the focus of significant utility marketplace activity, regulatory and legislative direction, and U.S. federal policy mandates and support. Although innovative initiatives are at work to transform the electric grid of today into an autonomous, self-directed, coordinated system, most current utility programs identified as smart grid (or in support of smart grid) are actually advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) or smart metering projects.

It is worth taking a closer look at how well these projects support a smart grid vision beyond the core AMI solution, as their foundational abilities vary widely. For the systems deployed, utilities and vendors alike must define how the current system can be migrated to encompass a larger vision than was in place when the system was chosen, designed or deployed. In addition to these ongoing AMI projects, utilities that are now evaluating the AMI business opportunity, selecting vendors or implementing AMI programs must definine how their AMI activities support the broader smart grid activities within the specific utility and the industry in general.

Foundational Nature of AMI

It isn’t surprising that many utility smart grid programs are actually AMI or smart metering projects because most were initiated prior to smart grid becoming a household term. Likewise many of them were initiated prior to the awards of the Recovery Act smart grid-related stimulus funding.

While these projects may not currently be smart grid projects, they are key foundational initiatives for the construction of a smarter grid, as AMI provides interval data collection and limited real-time events to support advanced rates, demand response, operational data capture and enhanced customer engagement. AMI’s foundational nature is diverse. AMI is key to many of the smart grid applications and concerns identified. It provides a ubiquitous communications infrastructure to link meters and other remote devices with utility operational systems and provides a structure for customer engagement. However, as DOE summarizes in its Smart Grid System Report, smart grid technologies, applications and programs encompass far more than AMI (see DOE box on page 36 ).

How Well Do AMI Projects Support Smart Grid?

In examining how well a specific AMI project supports the larger smart grid vision, some of the business and technical issues that must be considered include:

Corporate Goals. How do the smart grid initiatives support evolving corporate goals or visions? Are the primary drivers customer empowerment or engagement, renewable generation, operational efficiencies or other imperatives? While AMI solutions support all of these initiatives, a project’s focus will shape solution design, application phasing, deployment methodology and more.

Utility Operational Projects. How and where is the AMI project positioned within the utility’s operational technology projects? Are new or expanded SCADA, outage management, distribution management, workforce automation or similar projects being implemented? Because the smart grid includes a vision of a fully integrated future where applications seamlessly exchange information in real time and make decisions without human intervention, it is imperative that utilities not pursue disaggregated initiatives. A well-constructed and comprehensive information management model is needed within the utility that rationalizes what types of data are needed, from what systems and in what forms and frequencies to rationalize business investment and projects.

Communications Strategy and Architecture. AMI provides a significant communication system within the utility, but it is only one of many potential layers and networks. What are the corporate telecommunications strategy and supporting architecture to meet the significant communications requirements of the future grid? The amount of data that will be transported, the real-time nature of the information and the large variation in required quality of service among the component solutions makes an integrated plan critical.

Making AMI Truly Foundational to Smart Grid

The AMI solution will provide a communications network that covers substantially all of a utility’s customers. It is designed to provide two-way, real-time data at performance levels that support customer engagement and utility operations. Therefore, it is poised to be a foundation for a utility’s smart grid initiatives.

There are, however, some critical technical issues that must be adequately addressed during the technology and solution evaluation stage. For those utilities that have already deployed AMI solutions, it is strongly recommended that they perform a critical analysis of their solutions and their ability to meet the needs of a smarter and more automated grid.

For AMI systems to truly be foundational for a broader smart grid, they must at a minimum address the following issues:

• LAN/NAN design,
• Future demands,
• Robust prioritization system,
• Security requirements,
• Network management, and
• Utility/vendor alignment.

LAN/NAN Design. AMI local area network (LAN) or neighborhood area network (NAN) systems must be designed and built to accommodate communications traffic requirements beyond premise metering demands. This could include transformer meters, line monitors, faulted circuit indicators and other devices suitable for the AMI LAN/NAN. First generation AMI systems have focused on metering traffic alone and may not be capable of fully meeting increased requirements imposed by additional monitoring and control devices without network upgrades.

Accommodating Future Demands. Within the AMI system itself, additional requirements and bandwidth eventually will be necessary. Utilities may not be doing enough to anticipate future demands and make accommodations for these demands when choosing architectures, systems and vendors. While all future demands on the system cannot be identified today, certain strategies can be adopted today that lower unknown risks. These steps include identifying how the AMI solution as installed can be upgraded to handle unanticipated additional traffic. Depending on the architecture chosen—can additional spectrum be obtained, are more collectors required or must additional solutions be overlayed? No utility can afford to present its regulators with a plan to replace a recently installed AMI system because of a failure to adequately access future requirements. The industry seems to have accepted the ubiquitous remote download capability as the catchall for future support requirements, but the needs could surpass the capabilities of immature remote download/upgrade functionality.

Robust Prioritization System. What is the AMI system’s message prioritization capability and what flexibility exists for future design enhancements? During large outages or other significant system disturbances, traffic from all of the disparate sources could easily overwhelm the AMI system. It is, therefore, essential that a robust prioritization system be available to ensure that critical traffic has a higher degree of service than lower-level, data gathering exercises.

Supporting Security Requirements. How will the substation or distribution automation traffic component of a smarter grid with its higher quality of service, lower latency, higher availability and more rigorous security requirements be supported by the AMI solution? The security implications can best be defined through the work undertaken by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and evolving North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC/CIP) guidelines and will be forever evolving. Multi-tier architectures that physically separate traffic with different core telecommunications service requirements may be better long-term solutions than co-mingled traffic on a single network.

Network Management. The AMI solution has a critical network management component. How will the network’s nonmetering traffic be managed? Things to consider include how the system supports traffic segmentation, multiple independent channels, distinct destinations for different data and eparate service level commitments for each traffic flow.

Alignment of Utility and Vendor. An AMI initiative, as with most smart grid projects, depends on the synergistic cooperation of many internal utility stakeholders as well as selected vendor partners. A key factor in selecting the external AMI partners should be how well they can articulate a smart grid perspective and how closely aligned their vision is with the utility.

A smart grid is not about whether the latest exciting applications are deployed, how many remote sensors and automated devices are installed or the available system bandwidth and communications speed. The true measure of how well the utility has achieved a smart grid is the extent to which the new solutions, available information and disparate systems are integrated and coordinated to allow the utility to better manage existing and future utility, and perhaps nonutility, assets. Utilities must evaluate their AMI initiatives and solutions in light of the emerging smart grid attributes and requirements.

Kevin Cornish is an executive consultant with Enspiria Solutions Inc., a Black & Veatch company. A professional engineer, he has 25 years of experience in the utility field and holds a master’s degree in business administration in marketing and telecommunications management, a master’s degree in electrical engineering/power systems and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

DOE: What Makes a Grid Smart?

• Enables informed customer participation
• Accommodates all forms of storage and generation options
• Enables new products, markets and services
• Provides power quality for a range of needs
• Optimizes asset utilization and efficiencies
• Operates resiliently

Smart Grid System Report U.S. Department of Energy