ZPRYME FEATURES MILSOFT AND GIS

ZPRYME FEATURES MILSOFT AND GIS

One of my favorite new sources of info about the smart grid, Zpryme, interviewed me about my employer, Milsoft Utility Solutions, and geographic information systems (GIS).

Milsoft Utility Solutions Q&A: GIS & the Smart Grid

Eventually, every utility industry — telecommunications, water, and natural gas will rely on the benefits of GIS, Zpryme reached out to Austin, Texas-based thought leader, Steven E. Collier, Vice President of Business Development at Milsoft Utility Solutions, for a candid interview on the benefits, challenges, and milestones experienced with GIS in the smart grid space.

[ZP] What has been the most significant milestone in the past five years for GIS and utilities?

[MILSOFT UTILITY SOLUTIONS] The most significant progress in GIS resulted from the relentless march of Moore’s Law that has so greatly improved the capability of computers while reducing their costs. Coupled with this has been steady advances in information technologies that make GIS software both more powerful and easier to use. Finally, the increasing complexity of the electric utility business has caused almost every electric utility to realize that they simply cannot adequately plan, analyze, operate and manage their physical systems without fully capturing them in a GIS. Deployment of GIS is rapidly becoming minimum prudent utility practice.

Read the rest of the Q&A:  Zpryme article on Milsoft and GIS

See my IEEE Smart Grid "Ask Me Anything Session" on LinkedIn

Last Thursday, April 25, I did an IEEE Smart Grid "Ask Me Anything" session on LinkedIn. You can see it here:

     Steve Collier's IEEE Smart Grid LinkedIn "Ask Me Anything"

The primary subject of the session was the confluence of the Internet and the Smart Grid to form an Enernet. However, the questions and answers ranged widely from that topic.

The one-hour Q&A session has morphed into a continuing discussion / debate.

You are welcome to join the discussion.

DO YOU KNOW ABOUT TRANSACTIVE ENERGY?

YOU SHOULD LEARN MORE ABOUT A TRANSACTIVE GRID

I encourage you to read this article by Jesse Berst in SmartGridNews today:

          Why Every Utility MUST Learn the Word Transactive.

The only way that a truly intelligent, decentralized grid can work is via organized energy markets. Today the US grid has <20,000 utility owned generation plants and there are only few thousand small consumer owned generation facilities dispersed throughout the grid. In the future there will likely be many millions of endpoints the can produce or store power as well as many million residential, commercial and industrial energy management systems. This kind of network (just like the Internet) cannot be centrally monitored and controlled, much less dispatched via traditional voltage or frequency regulation AGC. It will become a "peer to peer" energy network facilitated by competitive energy markets.

The biggest barrier to full realization of the promise of transactive energy markets is inadequate transmission (and to a lesser extent, distribution) to fully enable the market. After all, for 100+ years the industry has built transmission primarily for delivery of power for large, central station power plants to remote load centers.

We'll be talking more about this in the future here and at The Energy Collective.

Thoughts?

MY FAVORITE SMART GRID INFORMATION RESOURCES

I often get asked, "What should I be reading about Smart Grid?" Well, here are my favorite smart grid resources to date:

BOOKS

The Smart Grid Dictionary by Christine Herzog 

Advanced Smart Grid: Edge Power Driving Sustainability by Andres Carvallo and John Cooper

Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities by Peter Fox-Penner

Understanding Electric Power Systems: An Overview of the Technology, the Marketplace, and Government Regulation (IEEE Press Understanding Science & Technology Series) by Frank Delea, Jack Casazza

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You by Jason Makansi

Smart Grid by Stan Mark Kaplan

Smart Grid: Fundamentals of Design and Analysis by James Momoh

Perfect Power: How the MicroGrid Revolution Will Unleash Cleaner, Greener, More Abundant Energy by Robert Galvin & Kurt Yeager

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability by David Owen

The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse by David Owen

REPORTS

 US DOE electricity adequacy report

“Keeping the Lights On in a New World,” January 2009 

http://energy.gov/oe/downloads/electricity-advisory-committee-eac-2009-keeping-lights-new-world

The US DOE final smart grid report

“Smart Grid: Enabler of the New Energy Economy,” January 2009 

http://energy.gov/oe/downloads/smart-grid-enabler-new-energy-economy

USDOE Smart Grid Primer

http://energy.gov/oe/smart-grid-primer-smart-grid-books 

USDOE The Smart Grid: An Introduction

 http://energy.gov/oe/downloads/smart-grid-introduction-0

ARTICLES

The Distributed Storage-Generation “Smart” Electric Grid of the Future. Roger N. Anderson, 

www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/10-50_Anderson_120604_120713.pdf 

Smart Grid News – Smart Grid Scorecard 

http://www.smartgridnews.com/pdf/Smart_Grid_Scorecard.pdf 

Jesse Berst’s “The Electricity Economy: New Opportunities from the Transformation of the Electric Power Sector August 2008” 

http://www.globalenvironmentfund.com/data/uploads/The%20Electricity%20Economy.pdf 

“A Useful Thing Happened on the Way to the Smart Grid: the Agile Grid,” Stephen Hadden, Vice President, Plexus Research, Inc. and Shannon Messer, Senior Consultant, R. W. Beck 

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=1748

NEWSLETTERS

Smart Grid News 

www.smartgridnews.com 

Intelligent Utility

www.intelligentutility.com

Smart Grid Today

http://www.smartgridtoday.com/

Fierce Energy

www.fierceenergy.com 

IEEE Smart Grid Newsletter

http://smartgrid.ieee.org/newsletter/

The Eagle's Perspective Newsletter by Warren B. Causey
http://wbcausey.com/Newsletter.html/ 

The Smart Grid Observer
http://www.smartgridobserver.com/ 

greentechgrid
http://www.greentechmedia.com/channel/gridtech

WEBSITES

Smart Grid Information Clearing House

www.sgiclearinghouse.org 

Smart Energy Portal

http://smartenergyportal.net/ 

IEEE Smart Grid Portal

http://smartgrid.ieee.org  

The Energy Collective

www.theenergycollective.com 

TMCnet Smart Grid

http://smart-grid.tmcnet.com/ 

Technology Platform Electricity Networks of the Future 

www.smartgrids.eu/ 

USDOE Smart Grid

http://energy.gov/oe/technology-development/smart-grid

National Energy Technology Laboratory

www.netl.doe.gov 

NETL Modern Grid Strategy Reference Shelf

http://www.netl.doe.gov/smartgrid/referenceshelf/#whitepapers

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory GridLAB Project 

www.gridlabd.org  

EPRI Intelligrid Initiative 

http://intelligrid.epri.com/ 

GridWise Alliance 

www.gridwise.org 

The Electricity Initiative 

www.galvinpower.org 

greentechmedia

http://www.greentechmedia.com/

SmartGrid Network

http://www.smartgrid.com/ 

Cisco Smart Grid

http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/energy/external_utilities.html 

IBM Smart Grid
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet

Intel Smart Grid
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/energy/energy-overview.html 

GigaOM / CleanTech
http://gigaom.com/channel/cleantech/

Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative
http://smartgridcc.org/

Smart Grid Library

www.smartgridlibrary.com 

I also blog at some other sites. You may be interested in reading and commenting on them. They began with an interview by IEEE SmartGrid that was a reprise of my 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival presentation, "The Smart Grid Is Inseparable from the Internet."

IEEE Smart Grid Interview With SmartGridMan, Part 1

IEEE Smart Grid Interview With SmartGridMan, Part 2

FierceSmartGrid published a summary of the interview:

Making the Case for an Internet Enabled Smart Grid

I then had a series of posts at The Energy Collective beginning with:

Energy Rationing ≠ Smart Grid

With three follow-up articles at Intelligent Utility:

Change the Grid, Not the Customer

Grid AND Customer: A Two-Prong Strategy?

Distribution Efficiencies "Versus" Customer Engagement?

Plus a follow-up article on Warren Causey's The Eagles Perspective newsletter on July 18, 2012:

Make the Grid Smarter, Don't Make Customers Bankrupt

I have had several additional posts at The Energy Collective:

Energy Rationing ≠ A Smart Grid
Automation Key to Supply and Demand

Technology Transforms the Utility Business Model

More to Meters Than Meets the Eye

Distributed Metering for Utilities and Their Customers

A Good Offense Is the Best Defense

Energy and Extreme Weather: Derechos and Hurricane Sandy
Electrical Grid Woes and the Rise of Edge Power Players

I will have more posts at The Energy Collective in coming months.

Finally, I was featured on February 28 on the IEEE Smart Grid Portal in:

A Round Up of IEEE Smart Grid Expert Opinions on What Will Be the Most Important Development to the Grid in 2013

I hope that you find my posts interesting and informative. I welcome your feedback.