1. What Utilities can learn from
Telcos (and vice-versa, really)
Arjun Roychowdhury
Assistant Vice President, Smart Energy
Co-chair, SIP Forum SmartGrid Group
arjun@hsc.com
2. Why does the grid need change?
Peak demand for electricity has 5 massive blackouts in past 40
exceeded transmission growth by yrs, 3 of which occurred in last 3
~ 25% YoY since 1982 yrs due to ‘poor visibility’, ‘lack of
•Ironically, lowest R&D investment in US in situational awareness’, ‘lack of
this sector (less than 2% of revenue) Outages due to lack of D&R analytics’
intelligence cost businesses > •Northeast blackout of 2003 - $6 billion loss
$100billion each year •Chicago Board of Trade outage in 2000 -
$20 trillion worth trades delayed
•Silicon Valley blackout - $75m loss
Source: National Transmission Grid Study, DoE; SmartGrid introduction, DoE
3. Similarities
Better Demand-Response management
• Simple Meaning: Utility Companies should be able to better analyze and manage electricity demands
Active participation by consumers in Demand-Response
• Simple Meaning: Give consumers more control, including options of generating their own energy, selling
extra energy back to the grid, more fine tuned control of energy consumption at home, etc.
Optimize assets and Operating efficiently
• Simple Meaning: Put an architecture in place that helps the electric grid players to reduce waste like
excess generation, more distribution of power generation, micro control of D&R etc.
Self-Healing
• Simple Meaning: If something goes wrong at one place, network should be able to route through other
sources (similar to, say, what happens when an IP router goes down in the path of routing IP packets
across the internet)
Resiliency during attacks (Cyber/physical)
• Simple Meaning: make it as hacker-proof as possible
Enable new products, services and markets
• Simple Meaning: Opening up network attributes always brings in innovation.
4. Key areas where the telco community can contribute
• 6LowApp – architecture and protocol for HAN
devices
• IETF RPL (Ripple) – Proposed IPv6 based
routing protocol (AMI/HAN etc)
• LBL: Automated Demand & Response
• IEC: 61850 & CIM
5. The Problem
• Lack of bi-directional knowledge
• “Not Invented Here”
• No focused group to address commonalities
• The Solution: SIPFORUM.ORG
