Review of 2009 Smart Grid News

Smart Grid is a topic captured my attention late last year and I have been (loosely) following the topic ever since. A Google Insights graph shows that I am right in line with everyone else and that 2009 was a big year for smart grid. In April 2009 I started collecting a few links on smart grid and this past summer I had every intention on posting a few links out to the things I had been reading. Well, the year just got away from me and later in the year I decided to do this 2009 roundup of news, sites and various links of interest. I know there is much more than what I have listed here, but these are my bookmarks.

Security in the smart grid is of particular interest to me. I've been in IT long enough, and have read Christopher Hoff's blog long enough now that I know security aspects of this technology can NOT be underestimated. Earlier this month President Obama appointed a new Cybersecurity Coordinator, Howard Schmidt. Let's just say I bet/hope security aspects of smart grid technologies are on his short list. Below is my list of smart grid websites about companies, products, projects and government related information. After that I'll list my news bookmark collection as 2009 progressed.

Smart Grid Companies / web sites / projects / government

• NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Project
  
• U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Electricity delivery and energy reliability
  
• NationalGrid
  
• HowStuffWorks: How the smart grid will work
• GridWise Alliance
  
• Zigbee alliance: an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard.
• EnerNOC: technology-enabled energy management solutions to help meet the needs of utility/grid operators.
  
• GridNet: Software intelligence to manage the smart grid
  
• ICE Energy: provider of distributed energy storage and smart grid solutions for optimizing energy system efficiency
• GE Ecomagination
  
• Cisco Smart Grid solutions
  
• Cisco EnergyWise
  
• IBM Smart Grid
  
• UtiliQ ranking of U.S. electrical utilities Analysis from IDC Energy Insights and Intelligent-Utility magazine
  
• SmartGrid stocks
  
• Smart Grid News
  
• SmartGrid - TMCNet portal
  

2009 time line of events and news about smart grids.
Interest in the topic peaked in April when the U.S. power grid being hacked was a big story, and then again in October when President Obama announced $3.4 billion in funds to enable the "largest single energy grid investment in U.S. history." I have a few news stories about the current power grid, but (to me) they are related to the smart grid.

• January 26: earth2tech FAQ: Smart Grid
  
• April 8 Cnet : Report: Spies hacked into US electricity grid
  
• April 9: U.S. Power Grid Hacked, Everyone Panic - Bruce Shneier
  
• April 9: Video - U.S. Power Grid Hacked
  
• April 9: CNN - Hacked power grid video on YouTube
  
• April 9: eWeek - Electric Power grid hack lights up cyber-security infrastructure experts
  
• April 16: White House: Vice President Biden Outlines Funding for Smart Grid Initiatives
• June 11: Government Computer News: DOE, NIST aim to secure smart grid
  
• July 12 Hacking Power : Feds Promise Smart Grid Security
  
• July 23: Science News: Electric grid still very vulnerable to electromagnetic weaponry
  
• July 28: IO Active - IOActive's Mike Davis to unveil smart grid research at Black Hat USA
  
• August 28: Cnet - Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
• September: InTech - Security, wireless standards on smart grid roadmap
  
• September 4: Defense contractors pursue the smart grid
  
• September 11: How to short-circuit the US power grid
  
• September 11: earth2tech - Utility interest in WiMAX for smart grid growing
  
• September 14: Computerworld - City 2.0: IT will make cities more engaging and energy-efficient
  
• September 16: ZDnet : IBM opens up systems framework for energy companies
  
• September 21-24 GridWeek
  
• September 24: Scientific American - How will the smart grid work?
  
• October 5: Business Week: The coming energy revolution
  
• October 21: Smart grid leads German revolution
  
• October 26: White House - President Obama explains the smart grid and economic recovery
  
• October 27: President Obama announces $3.4 Billion Investment to Spur Transition to Smart Energy Grid
• October 28: Here's where that smart grid money is going
• October 29: Network World : Q&A: Why IP is the right choice for Smart Grid
• October 29: Network World: Will smart grid power IPv6?
  
• November 7: Earth Times: Smart grid projects in 90 percent of U.S. states
  
• November 9: Data Center Knowledge: power grid hacking back in the news
  
• November 18-19 Green Beat 2009 conference on the smart grid
  
• November 20: Mother Nature Network: Smart technology may increase grid's vulnerability
  
• December 9: Renewable Energy Focus - GridWise alliance releases two smart grid reports.
  
• December 17: Smart Grid News: Report: Smart grid market could double in four years.
  
• December 18: U.S. Dept. of Energy - Secretary Chu announces efforts to strengthen US. electric transmission networks
  
• December 22: earth2tech: Top 10 trends for the smart grid in 2010, courtesy of Ray Bell.
  
• December 22: EE Times - Universities gear up for smart grid training
  
• December 25: The Hot Aisle - Want to understand the smart grid?
  

and in 2010....

• May 18,19, 2010: The Networked Grid
• 
  

Finally - my twitter list for SmartGrid

NASA's Nebula a Possible Federal Cloud Prototype

nextgov.com reports that a NASA cloud computing model, called Nebula is being looked at by NASA and the Obama administration for federal agencies to outsource IT services to a shared platform. "A significant journey ahead" may be an understatement -- an estimated 10 year migration would have several hurdles to manage.

NASA's Chris Kemp is working with the federal government's could computing working group. NASA CIO's Chris Kemp and Linda Cureton have blogs that I have been following for a while now. Chris managed the Google relationship and talks of the larger strategy with NASA and Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The NASA/Ames Research Center has the current #4 supercomputer (Pleiades), a SGI Altix ICE 8200 wiht a measly 51TB of memory.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra held a live chat several weeks back and has pretty ambitious plans for federal IT and data. You can see that even Vivek Kundra learned from Google -- the IT Dashboard site (very nice by the way) has a "beta" stamp on it.

Like many commercial data center consolidation projects, the federal government has about 70 data centers with "various levels of efficiency and availability that NASA is trying to contract to two outsourced data centers".

"Obama's fiscal 2010 budget proposal envisions optimizing cloud computing by "scaling pilots to full capabilities and providing financial support to accelerate migration," the budget stated. The fiscal plan acknowledges the effort will involve upfront costs, but the expense should be more than offset by savings from consolidating data centers."

Let's see -- one cloud with Google and one with Microsoft -- and then use all Cisco gear to network them together. :)

Check out the nextgov.com article here.

$1B Savings for Federal Data Centers by Going Green

Two new studies released today are getting some press. They cover how the U.S. Government could save $1B over five years, or $1.9B over 10 years in energy costs by applying the recommendations given in the reports. Many of the projections are based on the August report from the EPA outlining the energy-efficiency improvements possible for government and private sector data centers.

"Deploying green technologies in data centers can help the government save nearly 9.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in five years at a cost savings of $959 million, according to the HP and Intel study."

Check out articles on the studies here:

Tim Kauffman at the Federal Times

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee at Information Week magazine