Advanced distribution management technology promises to revolutionize operations.
Dick DeBlasio is chief engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (http://www.nrel.gov/). Additionally, he chairs the IEEE SCC21 Standards Coordinating Committee (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc21/) on Fuel Cells, Photovoltaics, Dispersed Generation, and Energy Storage, which sponsors and leads the family of standards for IEEE 1547 and IEEE 2030. Also he’s a member of the IEEE Standards Board and past member of the IEEE Standards Association Board of Governors.
The notion of a self-healing smart grid is compelling – even to the president.
“America’s energy sector is just one part of an aging infrastructure badly in need of repair,” President Obama said http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-... in his Feb. 12, 2013, State of the Union address to Congress. “Ask any CEO where they’d rather locate and hire – a country with deteriorating roads and bridges, or one with high-speed rail and Internet; high-tech schools; self-healing power grids.”
But just as the self-healing grid is only one component in a broad vision of national economic vitality that remains very much under construction, the self-healing grid itself is a still-coalescing vision. The enabling elements are in development today.
One aspect of that evolution is a standardized definition of what’s meant by the term, “self-healing” grid.