Broadband Buildout Would Enable New Smart Grid Apps, FCC Told

“The FCC has an important role to play” in promoting the smart grid rollout, said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, introducing the workshop. “However, we are but one of a number of important government players in this effort,” including several federal and state agencies. “Effective coordination among these entities’ interests is paramount. We must keep our eye on the ball and always remember that at the end of the day, each of us is … part of a larger team working to help improve the lives of all Americans.” Clyburn, who worked on energy issues at the South Carolina Public Service Commission, said she “witnessed first-hand the importance of modernizing our nation’s approach to energy. I believe firmly that our communications infrastructure can help accomplish that goal.”

Broadband and the smart grid intersect in several areas, most notably in metering electricity use, said Eric Lightner, director of the Department of Energy’s Federal Smart Grid Task Force. Many apps aren’t bandwidth-intensive, he said, but “there are certain applications that require a lot of data that you won’t be able to take advantage of unless you have a broadband connection.”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is assessing “the capabilities and strengths and weaknesses of the different wireless technologies, operating in both licensed and unlicensed bands,” said Dean Prochaska, NIST national coordinator for smart grid conformance. “At the end of the day what we want to do is develop guidelines for their use on different smart grid application requirements.”

The networks themselves have to be able to support future applications to come down the line, said Trilliant Senior Vice President Eric Miller. “Just controlling a substation doesn’t take a huge amount of bandwidth, but if that operator would like to have a video feed to see what’s going on in that substation … all of a sudden you need megabits worth of capacity in order to be able to do that.” To ensure reliability, the wireless network used by the smart grid should be private “to insulate it from the Internet,” he said. “You can’t have a worm take down the electric grid.” The public cellular network is to blame for most of Trilliant’s outages, he said.

But SmartSynch Chief Scientist Henry Jones said commercial wireless networks are sufficiently “secure, reliable and scalable.” Adding all the meters in the U.S. to AT&T’s network, for example, would only increase the carrier’s traffic 0.0002 percent daily, he said. And carriers are “pouring billions” into networks so they can advertise them as reliable, he said. Devoting a separate network to electricity could create problems in a disaster, because restoring the electric network might divert resources from fixing the cellphone network that people need for emergency communications, he added.

“At an individual meter in an individual location, and if you have coverage,” the public wireless network “works just fine,” Miller said. “Where we have challenges is when you start to backhaul [thousands] of meters and try to get it on a singular cellular line.” Coverage is a big problem for electric utilities serving rural areas, noted Jason Griffith, director of IT telecom engineering for utility company AEP. The public network is AEP’s first choice, but coverage is spotty in the company’s service areas, with many areas lacking cellular coverage altogether, he said. 4G technologies probably won’t help, he added. “If we don’t have the coverage today with 3G technology, what makes us think we're going to have the coverage with LTE?”

General Electric supports using dedicated spectrum, but opposes a government mandate to use it, said Chief Marketing Officer Mark Dudzinski. A mandate could “slow down deployment of the grid,” by unintentionally blocking new business models, he said. Use of dedicated spectrum must be optional because “we don’t want to strand any investment we've already made,” agreed AEP’s Griffith.