An Ignoble Experiment

2. IEEE contest cultivates future of Ethernet

Canada's Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has launched a new initiative to balance Ontario's power grid. Using a smart grid platform, Ontario's institutional, commercial and industrial consumers will be able to help the IESO to balance supply and demand on a second-by-second basis. This regulation service has only been provided by generators until now.

Credit: Andrevruas/Wikimedia Commons

"This project represents a big step forward for Ontario's electricity sector. Every day in our control room, we see the efforts consumers make to reduce their energy use at peaks, which in turn strengthens reliability," said IESO President and CEO Bruce Campbell. "Now, we are taking demand response to a new level. We are looking to major power consumers to provide a highly sophisticated -- and critical --component of grid reliability."

Regulation service acts to match total generation on the system with total demand on a second-by-second basis by responding to small and frequent changes in electricity consumption and generator output in order to maintain a constant balance. As a result, participants will increase and decrease their power use in response to real-time system needs. Large electricity users like Collingwood Public Utilities, Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, McMaster University and Walmart are among the first to participate.

"Building a smarter grid is part of Ontario's plan to modernize our energy infrastructure and provide clean, reliable power to consumers. Innovative technologies…support the Province's conservation efforts through improved efficiency for generations to come," said Bob Delaney, parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Energy.

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By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

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3. GridStar a model of the future grid

The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) is launching the "I Spy Ethernet IEEE 802.3" contest to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Ethernet and the 30th anniversary of IEEE 802.3 "Standard for Ethernet." Open to both young and experienced technology innovators, inventors, and architects globally, the contest seeks submissions of photographs or drawings of unique, groundbreaking, or visionary uses of Ethernet. Contestants are asked to submit a photo or a sketch of an example of how Ethernet is being deployed presently or how it might be deployed in the future.

The Ethernet is used everywhere along the grid, from control centers to transmission towers to distribution network substations.

"I like to use the term "lingua franca" for its role in enabling all data network protocols used in grid operations to talk to each other. As an inexpensive, cost-effective solution whose characteristics and applications are well-known in the power industry, its future role is assured," said James Gilb, IEEE 802 LMSC Executive Committee second vice chair. "As legacy equipment is upgraded to include data communications, it's likely that Ethernet will be used for wired connectivity. One of the major drivers for increases in Ethernet's speed going forward will be its use in Internet data centers and in automotive and industrial applications."

The power sector will surely benefit from these and other advancements, as will other industries.

"This contest is all about the future of Ethernet and its positive impact on humanity. And there's so much more to explore on a global scale in the areas of energy, healthcare, education and more," said Ethernet Inventor Bob Metcalfe. "The 'I Spy Ethernet IEEE 802.3' contest will help generate new and exciting ideas about what's possible with Ethernet technology and get more people thinking and talking about as yet unimagined Ethernet applications that will help change our lives."

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Ethernet enables smart grid

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By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

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4. "Nexus of Forces" transforming information security

As part of the GridStar Smart Grid Experience Center spearheaded by Penn State, a battery that helps improve the quality and reliability of the electric grid was brought online this week at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Credit: Penn State GridStar

The GridStar battery will initially help maintain the frequency of AC power on the grid. The battery uses a special control system to inject or draw energy from the grid based on a signal from a utility. In the future, the device could be used to help smooth out solar photovoltaic energy produced at the Navy Yard and reduce peak demand energy costs.

"Energy storage is an important part of building a more resilient and efficient electrical grid. This battery system has already helped us learn about the complexities of building and launching a grid interactive battery system," said David Riley, director of the GridStar Center. "We are using the lessons to inform new courses and training programs about the development of a smart grid."

The GridStar Experience Center at Penn State -- developed in conjunction with the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, the Department of Energy, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania -- is a model for what the grid of the future will look like. The Experience Center will feature energy storage, a smart grid demonstration home, electric vehicle charging stations and an indoor-outdoor training facility, as well as being used to illustrate functioning smart grid technologies for a variety of audiences.

GridStar's new microgrid combines clean and renewable solar power with energy storage enabling a range of new benefits including emergency backup power, peak demand reduction and power balancing on the grid.

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Penn State launches net zero demo facility

By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

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5. Transmission and distribution driving China's smart grid

The "Nexus of Forces" is transforming the approach to information security as new requirements are brought about by social, mobile, cloud and information, according to Gartner, Inc., which predicts that traditional security models will be strained to the point that, by 2020, 60 percent of enterprise information security budgets will be allocated for rapid detection and response approaches -- up from less than 10 percent in 2013.

An increasingly mobile workforce is demanding access to systems and information at anytime from anywhere. In this interconnected and virtualized world, security policies tied to physical attributes and devices are becoming redundant and businesses must learn to accommodate new demands being made on IT while also maintaining more traditional security controls.

"We are faced with a 'perfect storm' -- the convergence of socialization, consumerization, virtualization and cloudification that will force radical changes in information security infrastructure over the next decade," said Tom Scholtz, vice president and Gartner fellow. "Organizations are changing radically -- tearing down and redefining traditional boundaries via collaboration, outsourcing and the adoption of cloud-based services -- and information security must change with them."

Scholtz added that rapidly changing business and threat environments, as well as user demands, are stressing static security policy enforcement models. Information security infrastructure must become adaptive by incorporating additional context at the point when a security decision is made, and there are already signs of this transformation. Application, identity and content awareness are all part of the same underlying shift to incorporate more context to enable faster and more-accurate assessments of whether a given action should be allowed or denied.

Bring your own device (BYOD) is one of the most significant IT transformations happening today, according to Gartner, driven by an intense desire among employees to use personally-owned devices.

Different types of organizations are likely to take advantage of different forms of externally provisioned cloud services, according to Gartner. Highly sophisticated organizations, with large amounts of data that would be of interest to either competitors or regulators, are naturally hesitant to hand over control of their data's destiny to external parties. Smaller and less sophisticated organizations not only have fewer concerns about being able to demonstrate their data protection, but they also have less ability to build and maintain their own IT infrastructure.

"The megatrends of consumerization, mobility, social, and cloud computing are radically transforming the relationship between IT, the business, and individual users. Organizations are recognizing and responding to the need to move from control-centric security to people-centric security," said Scholtz. "People-centric security focuses primarily on the behavior of internal staff -- it does not imply that traditional 'keep the bad guys out' controls have become redundant. Indeed, many of these will be essential for the foreseeable future. However, people-centric security does prescribe a major change of emphasis in the design and implementation of controls -- always trying to minimize preventative controls in favor of a more human-centric balance of policies, controls, rights and responsibilities. It tries to maximize human potential by increasing trust and independent decision making."

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By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

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