Standards and the Smart Grid

Standards and the Smart Grid

Andrew Updegrove, Partner, Gesmer Updegrove LLP

6/16/2009
(Original Publish Date: 6/19/2009)

The managers of the aging United States electrical power grid have for some time planned to upgrade it to increase the quality of power on the grid and decrease the risks of power outages. They have also realized the potential for "Smart Grid" technology to be deployed to turn the existing system into an interactive, two-way energy network that recruits home and business owners to create electricity from alternative energy during off-peak hours that can be sold back into the grid when demand is high. Such a system can also conserve energy, lower its costs, and better absorb shocks that might otherwise bring down the system. Growing concerns over national dependence on foreign oil, the increasing costs of permitting and constructing new power generation facilities, and the need to decrease national emissions of greenhouse gasses led Congress to buy into this vision in 2007, when it mandated the creation of a Smart Grid. The current economic crisis provided a new administration in Washington with the opportunity to dramatically increase funding in the 2009 economic stimulus bill in order to speed the transition to a Smart Grid while producing thousands of new "green" manufacturing jobs. The operations of a Smart Grid, however, will be dependent on the rapid selection, and often development, of hundreds of new standards of many types. In this article, I review what a Smart Grid can achieve, the Congressional mandate and funding for the development of the standards needed to enable it, the process being used to select these standards, and the broad range of standard setting organizations that will provide them.