During the past three years, Consumers Energy has promoted its employee involvement in interoperability and security standards development for smart grid systems. However, these are not altruistic steps for the company. The time spent in standards development provides business value and risk mitigation for Consumers Energy as it prepares to implement smart grid technologies. Developing smart grid interoperability and security standards will help lower product costs and extend product longevity for Consumers Energy, as well as vendors and other utilities.

The smart grid and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems are an amalgamation of technologies that will be integrated into a complex two-way data flow that will interface with corporate applications. Most smart grid technologies are new and lack industry-accepted, interchangeable and standardized interfaces. For Consumers Energy, this incompatibility raises red flags about the long-term viability and potentially inflated prices for smart grid systems.

In response to a request from CMS Energy's president and CEO, Dave Joos, a small company team started investigating the smart grid in early 2007. Since then, the company, including representatives from the enterprise architecture organization, has been exploring smart grid and AMI technology possibilities, identifying vendor variances, testing selected products and conducting a pilot program before moving forward with a smart grid implementation. In addition to the valuable information that the team has gathered from testing and piloting vendor products, Consumers Energy also is gaining insights from other utility deployments. These insights are helping the company avoid making costly mistakes with its smart grid and AMI systems.

To support its risk-mitigation approach, Consumers Energy has created the Smart Services Learning Center, a smart grid and AMI testing and demonstration facility, to assess vendor products and provide product and integration testing. The company performs product field tests by using strategically deployed off-grid meters that are tied back wirelessly to the learning center. As part of the investigation, employees have traveled to other utilities and discussed their progress with ongoing implementations. Many vendor products have been brought to the learning center for thorough integration and testing. Having multiple competing products that cover the full scope of the AMI network, including home devices, corporate back-end systems and service providers, also allows for integration testing between vendors. Consumers Energy's initial testing and assessment has revealed a clear lack of product standardization and integration throughout the industry. With this in mind, the company believes more standardization must be achieved before beginning a full-scale smart grid and AMI system implementation. Company officers, managers and directors understand the risks involved with deploying systems too quickly and support efforts to further assess and improve vendor products.

Consumers Energy staff are working with other industry experts to help establish standards and guidelines for an integrated, secure smart grid systems environment. For example, the company helped create the SAP Lighthouse Council, a group of leading utilities and vendors that collaborate with SAP to develop standardized software and interfaces for smart grid and AMI systems and devices.

Employees also are helping ensure standardized interfaces are built into customer and grid-based devices to allow for easy connectivity with new utility systems and devices. They have been actively involved with other utilities, vendors, standards organizations and regulators to ensure appropriate security capabilities are built into the systems, and that systems can be updated easily when new security threats arise. Upgradability, standard interfaces and vigorous testing are the best methods for minimizing risks, avoiding product obsolescence and lowering product costs.

Some may question why Consumers Energy is devoting significant time and resources to support smart grid and AMI system interoperability and standardization. The company believes this is a realistic approach to a situation that involves emerging technology. Consumers Energy knows standards-based technologies prolong product life, reduce product costs, ease implementations, reduce support costs and provide better security than individually developed proprietary systems. A reduction in smart grid and AMI product, support and operational costs will become obtainable when the industry pulls together to resolve issues, establish interoperability, and create safe and secure systems. These actions will result in more than just an altruistic gesture. They will provide all stakeholders with a long-term advantage. Consumers Energy invites other utilities, vendors, regulatory agencies and standards bodies to support these efforts.

Wayne Longcore (wrlongcore@cmsenergy.com) is director of Enterprise Architecture and Standards, dealing with information and operations technologies within Consumers Energy.