One of the IntelliGrid Architecture project recommendations was the creation of a reference design for utility consumer portals. IntelliGrid defines a consumer portal as “a combination of hardware and software that enables two-way communication between energy service organizations and equipment within the consumers’ premises.” Figure 1 illustrates this idea; blue lines represent electrical connections, while green dashed lines represent communication.

At a technical level, a portal provides a physical and logical link between wide area networks and consumers’ in-building networks. It may be a “router” that simply forwards messages, or a “gateway” that translates between technologies.

A portal can be thought of as a “virtual device”: a set of applications and interfaces that may be located within a meter, a thermostat, a PC, a set-top box, a stand-alone device, or distributed among devices or appliances at a customer site. These applications would participate in large-scale distributed systems such as real time pricing systems, meter reading systems, and customer information systems.

In any case, a consumer portal provides a single point of access for multiple organizations to gather data from a variety of customer premises equipment. It is a “window” or “portal” into the customer site.

The IntelliGrid Consortium considers the concept of a consumer portal to be a key piece of the IntelliGrid Architecture. Widespread use of consumer portals should provide the volume and accuracy of data necessary to enable real-time simulation, modeling, marketing and predictive maintenance applications. These applications, built around newly developed algorithms, are the key components that are expected to make the grid predictive and adaptive in real-time.

The IntelliGrid Consumer Portal Project has three goals:

• Create a generic functional specification and reference design for consumer portals
• Collaborate with industry consortia and relevant standards bodies to encourage the development of portals

3. Identify and develop a portal field demonstration at a utility partner site that demonstrates open architecture and compatibility with manufacturer's products.

To date, the project has accomplished the following tasks toward these goals:

• Created a frequently-asked-questions list for consumer portals, summarizing the possible features of a portal and asking for input from stakeholders on how they would use one. The FAQ and survey are accessible from here

• Hosted a utility workshop on consumer portals in May 2005 and published the progress various utilities are making toward portal functionality.

• Identified the IntelliGrid Architecture uses cases that are applicable to consumer portals and can next be used to develop the functional specification.

• Performed an assessment of possible telecommunications technologies to be used by consumer portals.

• Identified a list of possible partners for a field of demonstration.

The next steps for the project team will be, in late 2005 and early 2006, to:

• Review and publish the telecommunications assessment report.
• Refine and identified IntelliGrid use cases and add details applicable to portals.
• Write and publish the functional specification based on the use cases and stakeholder feedback.
• Develop an object model for consumer portal operations based on the use case and requirements
• Use the object model as the basis for a consumer portal reference design.
  

EnerNex® Support of the IntelliGrid Consortium and IntelliGrid Architecture
EnerNex Corporation, led by co-founder and CTO Erich Gunther, was part of the original team that developed the IntelliGrid Architecture. Erich and his team are currently engaged in helping deploy IntelliGrid in the utility industry. Key components of this deployment include:

• Field demonstrations ranging from narrowly scoped automation projects to enterprise-wide integration
• Training workshops for utility partners and others
• Establish and maintain working liaisons with key industry standards organizations and consortia
• Miscellaneous technology transfer and industry outreach support

Under the auspices of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the IntelliGrid Consortium, an organization of utilities, manufacturers, and government entities was formed to address the following pressures within the power system:

Reliability. Incidents such as the 2003 Northeast blackout have pointed out that the grid is "brittle", i.e. susceptible to major outages resulting from failures in a few key locations.

Security. The September 11, 2001 attacks have highlighted the vulnerability of the power infrastructure to cyber attack.

Markets. Deregulation and the opening of energy markets have forced unprecedented sharing of information between utilities.

Consumer Input. Lack of funding for new generation from traditional sources, new sources of distributed generation, and increased demand for high quality power are driving the need for consumers to have input into the daily operation of utilities.

The IntelliGrid Consortium proposes that the most important way to address these pressures is to develop an overall communications architecture for the entire power industry. The current project-based approach to automating utility operations, they say, has created "islands of automation." It is well-known that utilities share very little data with each other; however, they are also poor at sharing data within their organizations, for instance between consumer metering, protection, control, energy management, and maintenance. These islands of automation cannot communicate smoothly with each other and therefore cannot acquire the data that is needed to solve large-scale systems problems like those listed above.

The IntelliGrid vision of a power system with a true communications architecture in place would be predictive, rather than simply reacting to emergencies. It would be continually self-optimizing and self-healing because of a flood of data from new sources reaching applications that could analyze the state of the system on a large scale. The current geographic and organizational barriers to communication would be lowered, permitting the power system to interact in real-time with consumers, independent power generators, and markets.

In 2003 the IntelliGrid Consortium formed a team of vendors and consultants to develop the first draft of such an architecture. They gathered information from several hundred industry stakeholders to develop dozens of use case scenarios for how the power system of today operates and how it should work in the future. These use cases included, for example, automatic meter reading, demand response, real-time pricing, advanced distribution auto-restoration, wide-area protection, automatic islanding, synchrophasor measurements, real-time contingency analysis and many others.

The IntelliGrid Architecture that was developed from these use cases consists of several components:

• A set of methodologies and tools that utilities can use to develop their own specific communications architectures in the same way the IntelliGrid Architecture itself was developed.
• The complete set of use cases, to be used as a resource for determining best practices.
• A recommended set of strategies for network security, system management, data management and basic interoperability. These strategies include the use of techniques such as object-oriented data, self-description, meta-data, and risk analysis among others.
• A well-defined list of the communications environments found within the power system that can be used to determine requirements for any given communications project.
• A list of recommended communications technologies for use in each of the listed utility environment.

In addition to these components, the IntelliGrid Architecture project team made a series of recommendations to EPRI and the IntelliGrid Consortium. These recommendations identified technologies, devices, and standards that were missing from today’s power industry and would be necessary to make the IntelliGrid Architecture work. The Consortium has proceeded to fund research projects to make these recommendations a reality.

It is important to define the word architecture in the context of utility communications: "The structure of components, their interrelationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time." This leads to a further definition of the IntelliGrid Architecture "an open, standards-based architecture for integrating the data communications networks and intelligent equipment needed to support the power delivery system of the future." The vision for the power system of the future includes the following attributes and objectives:

• Self healing and adaptive

• Interactive with consumers and markets

• Optimized to make the best use of resources and equipment

• Predictive rather than reactive

• Distributed across geographical and organizational boundaries

• Integrated through the merging of monitoring, control, protection, maintenance, EMS, DMS, marketing and IT.

• More secure from attack

More information can be found at http://publish.intelligrid.info/ or http://www.epri.com/intelligrid/.

For more information on our work with the IntelliGrid Consortium and the IntelliGrid Architecture, please send e-mail to info@enernex.com.