The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) has announced its next series of successes related to the development of interoperability standards for the Smart Grid. Within recent weeks, several critical steps were completed through the following Priority Action Plan (PAP) teams.

PAP 04: Common Scheduling Mechanism
With an expected future increase of distributed energy resources, including both distributed generation and demand response, coordination becomes more critical as smart grid applications begin to penetrate enterprise activities, home operations and family schedules, and market operations. This month, the WS-Calendar Technical Committee released a working draft of its requirements for the essential application program interfaces (API) for electronic calendars and schedules. A common specification, developed for other domains as well as for the smart grid, will better support interactions with those other domains and leverage broader adoption.

PAP 05: Standard Meter Data Profiles
As part of the activities to identify the standard meter data profiles for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), the PAP 05 team published its guidelines for “ANSI C12.19 End Device Communications and Supporting Enterprise Devices, Networks and Related Accessories.” These guidelines will enable existing ANSI C12.19 2008 data models to represent one or more meter profiles with distinct information locations and formats to simplify client access to commonly shared information. Since the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies (AEIC) had already developed a guideline to help utilities use the ANSI C12.19-1997 standard, the PAP05 working group accepted its offer to revise this 1998 guideline to meet its objectives.

Receptiveness to the PAP outputs is widespread and reflects a variety of interests in the electricity marketplace. Avy Moise, president of FutureDOS R&D Inc. said in regards to PAP 05, that he was “excited to finally see a comprehensive specification that can and will bring interoperability, efficiency and cost savings to all stake holders, including utilities, middleware providers, consumers, testers and regulatory agencies.”

Similarly, Larry Barto, metering services engineering manager for Georgia Power touted the accomplishment, saying that “the utility industry will have a more refined set of table implementation guidelines by which they will be able to better specify advanced metering systems that can more easily interoperate within the Smart Grid environment.”