Everyone's trying to integrate their electricity grid control systems nowadays.
The latest is German engineering giant Siemens, which announced Thursday that its Spectrum Power Shared Architecture platform, now being used by mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM, is available for free to all comers.
The platform is based on the common information model (CIM), a International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard for how utilities communicate with one another. It also enables the use of XML messages and web services in conjunction with that standard, Siemens said.
PJM's Advanced Control Center system is now using the platform to integrate disparate systems like energy management and market management, Siemens said. In basic terms, it offers a lower-cost, lower-complexity way to integrate new systems to make use of smart grid data, Siemens said.
Much of the focus on smart grid integration has been on getting smart meters, distribution automation systems, and back-office meter data management, customer management and operations systems to work together within a single utility (see IBM, Cisco Look to Tie Up Smart Grid Partners).
But the broader-scale entities that manage the interconnection of various utility transmission and generation systems – which are called independent system operators (ISOs) and regional transmission organizations (RTOs), respectively, in North America - also have quite a bit of work to do to get their systems interoperable.
That was the focus of an Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) project in Western Europe, meant to prove that different grid operators there can interchange data using the common information model to replace a previous system, Dave Becker, manager of control center technologies, EPRI, told Greentech Media in March.
Europe's Union for the Co-Ordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) has responsibility for making sure electricity flows smoothly across a massive territory from Portugal to Poland, and Greece to France, Becker said.
"When you get into tight situations, tight load days, or maybe certain generators are out for maintenance and the load comes up, it puts a little more pressure on operators," he said. An integrated system for managing the flow of information about such situations will help utilities find out "what are their new limits to stay within, so if something happens they don't cascade and go black," he said.
In Europe, UCTE has "the ability to make decisions and implement criteria that these different countries have to follow," he explained. "We can't do that as much in the United States, because we don' have one entity that controls our transmission grid." (For a map of North America's system, click here).
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is seeking more authority over America's transmission grid, given that carrying gigawatts of Midwest wind power or Southwest solar thermal power to load centers on the coasts will require lots of new transmission capacity that crosses state borders (see Green Light post).
That may put pressure on North American grid operators to get more integrated, and perhaps open up opportunities for systems like the one Siemens and PJM have developed.
