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Cisco’s smart grid vision, challenges

Tony Chan | May 26, 2009 | 0 Comments

Cisco Systems this week announced its entry into the smart grid sector with a strategy to adapt its products and services to add intelligence into core electricity grids currently operated by power utilities and energy services companies.

According to Dirk Schlesinger, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group’s managing director for Asia Pacific and global lead for manufacturing, the company experience as a major supplier of communications equipment and its portfolio of products that stretch from consumer end-points with its Linksys line to core media network solutions such as the CSR-1 routers, position the company as an ideal partner for the development of smart grids.

While the move will undoubtedly feature Cisco products in the mix, the focus of the strategy is really about serving utilities and helping them implement a smart grid solution, which Schlesinger adds goes far beyond simply smart meter solutions, but encompasses the automation of the energy supply chain – from the power generation station, across to transformer stations and substations to neighbourhood power lines.

“The Cisco vision is that we as a communications company will provide an end-to-end – from the power plant to your washing machine – secure, in the physical sense as well as the cyber sense, communications fabric, so not just a pipe, but a fabric, to optimise power supply and demand,” he explained.

The timing of the announcement should come as no surprise, with governments around the world announcing major smart grid initiatives, such as the Obama administration’s recovery plan for the US, and the Australian government’s recent A$100 million budget commitment on such infrastructure.

At the same time, Schlesinger adds that technology development, combined with regulatory trends, have brought the development of smart grids to a tipping point. Cisco projects that the smart grid technology and infrastructure market will be worth some US$20 billion in five years and is targeting several billion US dollars in revenue from that market in that period.

CHALLENGES REMAIN
But putting smarts into the utility grid is not just about overlying a communications network on top of the electrical distribution system. Schlesinger says that for ‘smart grids’ to yield maximum benefits, it has to be about more than just the relying usage data from the consumers back to the utility – it has to be about automating the entire power distribution, so that it can respond to demand and supply parameters dynamically and in real time. In other words, the two infrastructure must be tightly integrated, so control algorithms can be developed and applied for features such as load balancing.

That level of integration now presents major challenges for the smart grid developers, including Cisco. One of the biggest challenges is the fact that utilities are not going to be ripping out the existing grid and replacing all the equipment. Smart grid implementations will need to support the legacy equipment inside the utility infrastructure.

“I once tried counting the protocols inside a utility’s operation and I stopped at 250,” said Schlesinger. “There are many makers, and many versions of these equipment and they are all different. Smart grid equipment will have to support all these protocols.”

At the same time, smart grid communications equipment will have to be tough, for example, operate under severe environmental conditions. “In China for example, equipment on utility poles need to support operating in temperatures ranging from -35 degrees to +85 degrees,” he said, adding that current communications equipment simply don’t support those requirements. “At the same time, utilities equipments are designed to last 40 years. No one will want to go out to a transformer station and replace network cards every three years.”

THE ROLE OF TELCOS
One major challenge for telecoms operators looking at the smart grid opportunity is reliability, which rules out open networks such as GSM, Schlesinger said. “For basic functionality like relaying meter information back to the utility at regular intervals would work with SMS on a network like GSM,” he said. “But for real time, mission-critical grid services, SMS just won’t work because if anything happens, everyone gets on their phone and on SMS, so the network is not protected against these spikes.”

For smart grids, dedicated spectrum, or dedicated bandwidth, is needed to ensure that when the regulator network experiences congestion, the smart grid communications don’t get impacted. This model essentially outlines the need for a dedicated network, or dedicated service, for running smart grids.