Every design needs an architect, and the smart grid is no different. If anyone could be called an architect of the smart grid, Doug Houseman, vice president of technology and innovations at EnerNex, could. He is the lead architect for the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel’s (SGIP) Conceptual Architecture Project, the coordinator for Smart Grid Tutorials for IEEE, Secretary of the IEEE Smart Grid Coordinating Committee and the lead author of the CEATI Distribution Utility Technology Roadmap. The SGIP engages stakeholders from the entire smart grid Community in a participatory public process to identify applicable standards, gaps in currently available standards, and priorities for new standardization activities for the evolving smart grid

Houseman has spent the last 20 years traveling around the world to solve T&D-related issues. He has also spent the last 15 years leading a global utility architecture practice.

“I have learned the needs that are most common and the architecture pieces that help make an architecture actionable,” Houseman said. “Given the work over the last 18 months on the Smart Grid Architecture Committee’s (SGIP-SGAC) Conceptual Architecture, I have had the pleasure of working with the best of the best in North America on a common conceptual architecture framework for Smart Grid in North America.”

Houseman is now playing a role in organizing the Grid-Interop Plug-in on Dec. 5-8 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Plug-in is a smart grid interoperability show-and-tell; it will provide a central place where multiple vendors can unite to present applications of interoperable devices and systems in action.

With standards efforts now bearing real fruit, a cross-section of industry organizations will demonstrate 15 to 20 examples of emerging, evolving and mature interoperability standards in the following categories:

• Residential products and solutions;
• Commercial and industrial (C&I);
• Automated Demand Response;
• Transmission and distribution (T&D);
• Back office;
• Cyber security.

This program is being organized by: GridWise Architecture Council (GWAC), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Energy, Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), Electric Power Research Institute, UCA International Users Group, Clasma Events, and EnerNex, along with support from numerous sponsor and partner organizations.

Houseman is also helping organize Architecture 101, a bootcamp session that provides an overview of why smart grid architecture is important, specifically as it relates to the interoperability standards needed for smart grid to flourish.

“If you can design a future you can execute it. If you cannot picture and design the future, you will never achieve it,” Houseman said.

Houseman’s purpose in working with smart grid architecture and in teaching it is to make a better future. He said he also enjoys interacting with “some of the brightest, most creative people in the industry. Bouncing problems off these people and getting reactions leads to all sorts of ideas about how to make a better future,” he said.

Houseman started early in the utility business at age 9, when he would ride along with his father on weekends to put up line poles for electrification in the rural area they lived in. At 17, he decided to join the Navy and when they figured out he understood electric utilities, “that was all there was,” he said.

Now, he has developed and taught most of the IEEE smart grid tutorials and is working with Ivy Tech in Indiana to create a smart grid lineman course that will be taught on all of their campuses in Indiana (They are the community college network in Indiana). He said he had a great time at the IEEE PES General Meeting this summer teaching 3-1/2 days of smart grid tutorial and working with a wonderful set of students. He is also leading a number of tutorials and sessions at the IEEE T&D show in the spring, including two new ones that have never been taught before.

Houseman tells students that learning the mistakes of others can make their projects go so much better and even make them more fun. He likes to keep his courses fun and interesting and to challenge the students and get them to react. “It is no fun to just absorb, you have to force people to think, and think hard during a class,” he said.

Designing the smart grid is not his only goal. He builds and flies high-powered model rockets, and his next goal is to pass 50,000 feet with a cardboard and plastic rocket.