The White House is feeling industry pressure to complete an initial set of HAN standards as fears of a smart-grid information bottleneck grow.
Pressure falls on NIST to finalize home area network standards for smart grid
The heat is coming from appliances manufacturers who hope to enlist administration support in the National Institute of Standards and Technology review now underway to assure interoperability among competing standards and protocols.
NIST published a “roadmap” document in January with a preferred list of smart grid and home area network standards, but a schedule for final selection doesn’t appear to be in place. The aim of the review is prevent market confusion and divergence, and to promote open communications. NIST hopes to establish 77 smart-gird standards over the next few years with 14 this year.
“This has to be done as quickly as possible, “ concedes John McDonald, a general manager at GE and chair of the governing board of NIST’s Smart Grid Interoperability Panel. “There has been a lot of pressure at the White House.”
Among the leading candidates in the initial HAN standards race are the wireless technologies Zigbee and Wi-Fi and the powerline technology HomePlug. Determining a final list will provide big benefits if utilities are to deliver on the promise of demand response and greater system efficiency. Utilities need an effective distribution system with reliable two-way communications extended into the home if they hope to lower residential loads during high demand periods –perhaps by delaying defrost cycles in refrigerators or reducing power to stove tops.
California is waiting for national action so it doesn't place standed assets in the field, says CPUC Utiliites Energineer Wendy Al;-Mukdad.
From the industry perspective, standards will lower products costs and simplify development. At GE, a new hybrid water heater comes with a Zigbee connector on its side instead of integrated inside. That way it can be replaced if standards favor a different technology. However, integration would make the product less expensive to manufacture.
Product design is of particular important to companies such as Whirlpool, which promises to have 1 million smart dryers in the market by the end of 2011.
NIST’s next step is to broaden its examination of technologies beyond the Unites States to determine how technology development in places such as Japan and China might influence deployment here.
Despite the work ahead, McDonald says he is serious about getting the standards work completed sooner rather than later. It that means changing the leadership, then a change needs to be considered, he says.
He adds: “If we don’t have the house situation worked out, it’s going to be a bottleneck.”
The fallout from the lack of standards is already being felt in places such as California, where the California Public Utilities Commission put off smart grid decisions for fear of placing non-standard equipment in the field.
The commission wants to make sure utility investments don’t become “stranded assets,” said Utilities Engineer Wendy Al-Mukdad at this week at the ConnectivityWeek conference in Santa Clara. As a result, “We’re waiting for a lot of the national action on standards and protocols” to conclude.
Posted by Mark Boslet 
