But, what we lose at times is true innovation and some unique, vendor specific features and capabilities that are not included within the standards. With a standard, comes vendor interchange. It needs to be stated that adoption of standards has benefits and disadvantageous. While some vendors resist this advancement, others embrace it so it is moving forward, albeit not as fast as we would like to see. Once available, they can have the single vendor shackles removed from their purchasing process, thereby allowing an open multi vendor business model that provides robustness, cost effectiveness, enhanced support, and most of all, trust and confidence to these emerging smart grid networks. Utilities are anxiously awaiting these standards to be included into smart grid products. Interoperability is coming to these standards with the introduction of the evolving industry driven Wi-SUN (Wireless Smart Utility Network) standard that promises interchange between vendors. Another example is the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) 6LowPAN standard which drives the IETF IPv6 standard to the Internet of Things (IoT) network. An example are the IEEE 802.15.4g and 802.25.4e protocols. Various groups have been developing standards to support these Utility needs. This next step in the maturation process is critical to long-term dependability and performance for the new smart grid applications. The smart grid is now moving from its infancy and maturing to the next early stage of its lifecycle with the advent of open architecture and standards based networks. A different approach is necessary for Utilities to move forward with confidence that the networks they buy today can support their needs and applications over the longer term. As well, some of these networks worked well for simple tasks like residential meter reading, but failed to perform for more demanding tasks like C&I requirements, renewable energy, smart cars, and smart grid connections. This locked the Utility into the one vendor solution and forced future procurement decisions. The problem is that these vendor specific networks have been based on closed architecture that was propriety to specific vendors. Until now, we have had to depend upon our meter vendors to provide the communication networks for these tasks. Smart grid devices such as power line meters, transformer meters, reclosers, segmentation switches, tie switches, solar arrays, wind farms, and cap banks are all common new additions to the communications network too. But, now Utilities are thinking beyond these initial meter deployments and are adding traffic from Corporate and Industrial (C&I) meters to these networks too. Of course, the most popular device is the residential smart meter. A wide variety of devices are being connected. All Utilities are going through major changes with the addition of large scale communication networks to permit interconnectivity to devices on their grids.
0 kommentar(er)
