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Part 4 from the article, “GE And Google Announce ’21st Century’ Electricity System”

Everyone is familiar with the Internet. The Internet has driven immeasurable (if someone knows a good site or study that has measured the productivity impact of the Internet, please send me a link) productivity and efficiencies in everything from personal shopping to business processes and supply chains around the globe. The impact is so pervasive to society, business, and social movements that we almost take it for granted. It took the landslide win of Obama to remind everyone of the power of the Internet. Obama was able to raise an unprecedented half a BILLION dollars, mostly over the Internet with almost half of it coming from well over one million individual donors giving less than $200 each. The immediacy of being able to reach millions of individuals, and then to transact with them would not have been possible without the Internet.

Jumping back over to the Smart Grid, it is critical to understand that all the initiatives to modernize our grid across all the areas discussed previously are reliant on smart devices being connected to smart computer systems designed and managed by smart people. Communications are the fundamental underpinning for the large range of solutions in a given area. Yet, in many cases, I continue to see that the network is being taken for granted or being planned project by project instead of having its own focus. Now, I’m not proposing that any one networking technology is a fit everywhere because there clearly isn’t one perfect technology. What I am saying is that Utilities need to have an overall strategy around communications networking, and ensure that their various smart grid initiatives fit into that strategy.

There are many choices out there today around networking; fiber, Broadband Over Powerline (BPL – yes it’s still around), Power Line Carrier (PLC) technologies, Wireless Mesh (a whole variety of choices, typically vendor proprietary), private radio (still offered by the likes of Motorola), and of course public wireless technologies such as GSM, CDMA, and more recently WiMax. There are real tradeoffs among all of these choices. At the very top level, tradeoffs range from building and operating the network yourself (still not sure why so many Utilities go down this path) vs. using someone else’s network and paying for the service and data that you use. Below this top level issue, it gets very technical into speeds and feeds, manageability, reliability, security, etc…

Let’s just examine the build & own vs. rent a network dimension. We are now heading into what just about everyone is saying is a long and deep recession. So, what are most good enterprises focused on? Cash! As a colleague of mine recently remarked, “cash is king”. Now, Utilities are typically pretty resilient in times like these, with strong monthly cash flow coming in (people usually will make sure they have power and heat before other luxuries). That said, there are probably not too many projects that are more capital intensive than building broad wireless networks (other than maybe building power plants or starting a new airline company). While I could go into all the speeds and feeds, and tradeoffs among BPL, PLC, Cellular, Mesh and others, I think that Andy Seybold’s blog has just completed a nice article that makes some key points, albeit specifically around BPL (see http://www.andrewseybold.com/blog.asp?ID=214 ). He obviously is biased toward the use of public carriers, as am I, but he makes some really strong arguments about betting on single vendor proprietary technologies that haven’t hit broad market scale. This is always a risky strategy for any enterprise. Remember Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)? DEC couldn’t open up and build a big enough ecosystem to scale costs and capabilities to compete with open systems like Unix and Windows. With that said, it’s unclear to me how BPL, PLC, and Mesh technologies will be able to compete at scale over long periods of time. I’m not purely saying Cellular is the only way to go, btw. I think Zigbee will become a very viable short range wireless because it’s open and has a huge list of companies building around it. Zigbee has promise. Find me the same scenario in the Mesh or BPL space.

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