Interview 

George Arnold

National Coordinator for Smart Grid Interoperability, NIST

One benefit of having open standards is to unleash the innovation of the consumer electronics and home automation industries to develop devices and applications to monitor and control energy usage.

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George Arnold is the nation’s first National Coordinator for Smart Grid Interoperability. His mandate stems from the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which lays out the national policy for grid modernization and directs NIST to coordinate the development of the interoperability standards.

Here are highlights from his recent interview with On The FrontLines.

On The FrontLines (OTFL): What are you trying to achieve with the Smart Grid?

George Arnold, NIST: One goal is to facilitate increased use of renewable and distributed resources. And the issue there is that a lot of the renewables, particularly wind and solar, can’t be con­trolled in the same way as a coal fired plant or a natural gas plant or a nuclear power plant.

You can’t control cloud cover and wind. So you need the abil­ity to balance the generation of electricity with the demand for electricity; you need a much more dynamic control system, so the intelligence in the Smart Grid is what makes that possible.

A second goal is to improve the reliability of the system. If you look at the outage statistics in the US, we have about 130 min­utes of outage a year per customer and the comparable figure for Japan is about 12 minutes. By the way, statistics have shown outages cost the economy about $80 billion a year.

A third goal is to provide both the electric utilities and the cus­tomers the ability to manage their use of electricity so that the system can be managed more efficiently. And to illustrate that point, the capacity of the system has to be sized to handle peak periods.

OTFL: Why is that important?

George Arnold, NIST: Usage has to be shifted to lower demand periods of time so you can actually reduce the amount of genera­tion and transmission capacity that’s needed.

That’s important because the generating capability in the US is about half supplied by burning coal. About half of the coal plants in operation are more than 40 years old, and so they are going to have to be either modernized or replaced over the next 20 years. If we can operate the system more efficiently, that will reduce the need to replace some of this generation that’s going to have to be retired.

OTFL: What’s the most tangible threat to the Smart Grid?

George Arnold, NIST: Cybersecurity! As we introduce automa­tion into the grid, if we are not smart, we can introduce significant new vulnerabilities. If we do it intelligently, we can actually en­hance the security of the grid. The automation in the grid today is not very secure. A lot of it has been around for a decade or more and predates the kinds of cybersecurity technologies and processes that we have available today.

Underpinning the standards work that we are doing is a very intense focus on cybersecurity. You really have to have what we call a ‘defense in-depth strategy’ and think of the systems as a castle with multiple layers of moats and walls. You have to as­sume that there’s going to be a penetration at some point and be able to detect it and stop it at the next level.

OTFL: What are some challenges you face?

George Arnold, NIST: We’ve got 3,000 electric utilities; we’ve got hundreds of suppliers and we have the international dimension. We don’t want to use standards here that are totally different than what the rest of the world is going to be using, because that increases costs and makes exports difficult for manufacturers. So getting consensus is certainly a big challenge.

I’d say another challenge that we face is that consumer aware­ness of what we are doing on the Smart Grid is quite low. It’s a buzz word but consumers don’t really understand. We need to educate consumers on how these investments in the grid are going to make the system more reliable and reduce costs for con­sumers because they will know how much they are consuming and have the automation in their homes. It will, based on their preferences, run appliances when it’s most cost effective and save money. These are benefits that people need to understand, because using less energy is the most cost effective way to re­place an obsolete plant.

OTFL: How long will it take smart metering technologies to reach consumers?

George Arnold, NIST: I think there are roughly about 12 million smart meters already deployed. With the Recovery Act invest­ments there will be an additional 18 million deployed over the next 3 years. And then plans are on file by utilities not being funded by the Recovery Act will result in 40 to 50 more million smart meters in the next 4 to 5 years. Add to that there are already about 60 mil­lion meters that are AMRs (automated meter readers) that can be read locally by a meter reader driving by in a truck. So, something like 110 million meters will have some form of automation in the next 4 to 5 years, and there are a total of 140 million meters in the US.

OTFL: If somebody wanted to get involved with the Smart Grid or wanted to get training, what do you think they should do?

George Arnold, NIST: One thing they could do is join the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel that we’ve set up. That’s the organiza­tion that is dealing with the standards. The membership in that is free. The membership is by organization, so an individual would have to participate as part of whatever company or organization they are part of, but it is open to anyone and the NIST website has a link to that and membership. That would probably be the easiest way to become involved.

Also, there are a number of universities that are setting up curricula on this, for example in the University of Colorado has set up a program specifically on communications technologies for the Smart Grid There’s about $100 million of the Recovery Act money that is going into the Smart Grid allocated to workforce development programs. So looking at the organizations that are the recipients of those grants would probably be the best place to start. And many of them are universities.

OTFL: What is your personal vision of what’s going to happen in the next couple of years?

George Arnold, NIST: What I see is the availability of information about energy usage; and easy to use plug and play automation is really going to allow us to—in the same way that the Internet has really dramatically transformed the way we think about and use information—dramatically transform the way we think about and use energy.

So I see us being able to power our economy and life style while using a lot less energy in the process with the ability for consumers that want to be more self-sufficient, to have their own sources of energy and have a much more reliable energy supply.

OTFL: In closing, what excites you about your job?

George Arnold, NIST: This excites not just me but everybody who is working on this program. It’s really a once in a lifetime oppor­tunity. The electric grid is 100 years old, the National Capital of Engineering labeled it as ‘the supreme engineering achievement of the 20th century’; and reengineering it to create a grid that will be with us for the next 100 years is really a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The Perfect IT Sustainability Forecast: Cloudy with a 100% Chance for Green!

Energy management, the mobile workforce and IT virtualization/consolidation policies are driving an increasingly Green forecast.

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Green IT and Cloud computing form the perfect digital mar­riage.

Vivek Kundra mandates both in his 25 Point Imple­mentation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management (announced December 9, 2010). Further, both are linchpins of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI).

“The FDCCI will cut down the number of data centers across the government and assist agencies in applying best practices from the public and private sector, with goals to: Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers,” writes Kundra in his 25 point plan.

Kundra is directing agencies to shift to “light technologies”, that is cloud services, which can be deployed rapidly and will re­sult in substantial cost savings. Going “light” will make it possible for the government to reach its stated goal of consolidating at least 800 data centers by 2015. And reach the Green goals out­lined in Executive Order 13514.

Powering Down At EPA

At EPA, CTO Vaughn Noga is concerned with meeting these goals.

“You can’t manage it if you don’t measure it,” said Noga. “So we have spent the last year really rolling out an infrastructure across the entire agency to be able to measure our sustainability goals of 100% power management. So we’ve deployed across 20,000 plus end points across the agency so we can start looking at how we are achieving these goals. Not just that, but also how we are managing the infrastructure as well.”

The next step is really exploiting Cloud computing “There are opportunities certainly for some applications hosted across the government that could easily transfer to the Cloud. There’s more work to do but there’s another huge opportunity there to exploit the capacity that’s sitting in the Cloud versus buying ca­pacity that may be only 20% utilized in your data center.”

EPA has been virtualizing infrastructure since 2005 both on the compute and storage sides said Noga, who sees new Green opportunities at the desktop level. “So really it is looking at how do we get from the data center out to the end points and start looking at optimizing that part of the environment. Things like virtualized desktops, things like thin computing.”

Then the last thing is the mobile workforce said Noga. “It’s about using IT to enable the Green environment. And this is where we see a lot of opportunity, enabling the mobile workforce. Put­ting the technologies out there and reducing our impact on the environment. That’s a huge opportunity for us.”

Green Partners

Providing the technologies that reduce impact on the environ­ment and help mitigate rising energy costs are two areas HP’s John Sindelar works on daily.

“One of the opportunities is to mitigate rising energy costs, actually driving out energy costs through sustainability,” Sindelar told OTFL in a recent interview.

Sindelar said with advanced metering capabilities and initia­tives going on across government now, agencies can gather data from end points and aggregate it to an enterprise level dashboard. Then they can address it real time in terms of making decisions on your priorities when reducing your energy and carbon footprint.

Once you have that data you can look at energy usage across the enterprise or by individual site with an automated approach. Sindelar said the benefits include the ability to do data modeling, which basically allows you to again determine what your priorities should be.

“Also what I am talking about is the decision support tools that provide capability for command and control, which is ex­actly what we do in private data centers with HP’s Environmental Edge,” Sindelar said.

“We can tell through our sensors today inside a data cen­ter for example, what the temperature is, what the pressure is, what the humidity is, what the power consumption is overall, and where we see anomalies we can take action immediately to reduce that and that’s a big advantage in terms of lowering your energy consumption.”

Three IT Impacts

Terrance Clark from CA Technologies told OTFL that Green gov­ernment has an organizational impact that goes far beyond IT.

“We essentially see that involving three areas. The first area would be IT’s own impact,” explained Clark. “That’s looking at the data center; what can IT do to make it be more efficient; look­ing at power management of desk tops and the life cycles of the physical assets and what do you do from procurement all the way through to retirement of those assets. So that’s the first area and there are a lot of things you can do within that.”

The second area is things that IT can help eliminate or dema­terialize. That could be smarter printing, video conferencing and the increased electronic delivery of products and services.

Clark pointed out the third area saying this is the area where the greatest opportunity to leverage IT lies. That’s using IT to help transform the agency across all its operations into a more sustainable organization.

“That’s doing that whether it’s more powerful and automated measurements, better analysis, better reporting and ultimately providing technology that takes action; and goes even beyond the organization into the suppliers and the vendors as well as the consumers or citizens.

So I would break it down into those three buckets. What IT can do to help its own impact? What IT can do to help eliminate or dematerialize some of the operational things? Then really looking at how do you provide technology to go more broadly across the organization?”

Opening Green Options

GSA recently announced plans to deploy telepresence solu­tions in a number of their higher populated federal centers around the country. Enabling people to communicate face-to-face in a high definition environment should reduce travel, which in turn should significantly save in carbon reduction as well as travel expenses.

The new Telework law increases the mobility of government workers, while putting more pressure on the network and rais­ing security flags. How the government is handling the increased network loads and security is one focus of Cisco’s Paul Brubaker.

“We’ve been focused a lot with our clients on ensuring their net readiness for the mobile workforce. But the trick is to get them to the point where their networks are ready for the kinds of demands and the kinds of security challenges that they may face from a truly mobile workforce,” explained Brubaker.

Brubaker told OTFL in a recent interview there are ways to create VPNs and appropriate hard networks to accommodate a truly mobile work force so that people can be productive in virtu­ally any environment.

“You know the whole movement to the Cloud plays into this pretty heavily as well. Because the thinner the client you have and the more you have in the Cloud, the Cloud can certainly enhance that mobility capability,” said Brubaker.

“We can accommodate everything from the thin client to the fat client. I think folks will realize that the more they put in the Cloud and the thinner the client they can achieve, the greater the savings they are going to realize over time.”

The bottom line is you are seeing significant ROI through greening said Brubaker. “It’s a win, win, win. It’s a win from a Green perspective; it’s a win from a dollar savings perspective and it’s a win from an operational improvement perspective.”

“It also gives you that resiliency element that we’ve been wrestling with since long before 9/11. But we are finally getting to the point where we’ve got the capability of addressing these things in an environment that is efficient, cost effective and Green. So I think it’s a triple win here.”

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Put an energy savings goal out there and it’s amazing what people do to reach and exceed it asserted Kevin Kamp­schroer, GSA Director of High Performance Buildings.

Kampschroer told the Federal Executive Forum audience that during a recent retrofit, GSA put individual lighting controls at each desk with a meter measuring usage. “We put a little meter on the desk and took the on/off control away from the building automated system and gave it to the people.”

The thought was the new technology might yield a 30% reduction in energy costs.

“But they didn’t take into account the hu­man behavior factor,” said Kampschroer. “They got 60% reduction in energy costs, because it turns out people turned the lights down most of the time. They didn’t override the system. Get the knowledge out there and people will behave dif­ferently.”

Buildings That Work For People

But it’s more than that because what we are really doing in this area is to try and make buildings work better for the people in them. So we are going to look at different kinds of measurements, where we can tie productivity back into what is happening in the building. Because you don’t need a building for the building’s sake, you need the building for what actually goes on in the build­ing said Kampschroer.

“So we are trying to tie those together in a more meaningful way. You see that in data centers a lot, we are trying to figure out how the machines and the building work together; and you are seeing huge energy savings just from understanding that inter­relationship.

“You can get 20% improvement in energy performance in a data center and not spend one penny. Just by moving the ma­chines around, creating hot and cool aisles, things like that.”

“So we are trying to push the natural light further into the building, take the corner offices off the windows and pull them back into the center or maybe have no offices. Lighting systems have really improved over the last 3 to 5 years and so we are do­ing a lot of lighting projects out of Recovery Act that are going to make improvements in the way people work.”

Get Everyone At The Table

Sometimes, solutions are as simple as keeping everyone in the loop—IT, operations, maintenance, administration and staff. “We find, for example, that in buildings today, 80% of the people think that the buildings are too cold in the summer time.” Now that’s a zero cost improvement in people’s comfort and lowering the costs of the operations of the building. It’s just getting that infor­mation into the right hands, noted Kampschroer.

“I think the big deal is to get everybody at the table. You talk about the number one guiding principle for a new building is inte­grated design. Get everybody in there. Don’t have the architects working in one room and the engineers working in a different building, and the tenants, who are they?”

“By just looking at how people work, when they work, and where they work, you can reduce your geographic footprint and thus your carbon footprint goes down even more. That’s the easi­est way to reduce your carbon, just to use less.”

Use BIM To Simulate and Analyze

To be able to reduce their carbon footprint according to Bob Middlebrooks from Autodesk, government needs to have models of its existing buildings; plus an analysis of those existing build­ings, how they perform from an energy perspective and what their potential improvements are.

In a recent interview with OTFL, Middlebrooks said with to­day’s capabilities in photogrammetry and laser scanning and other types of data acquisition, doing simple building models is no longer a prohibitive activity. “It can be done fairly quickly especially if your goal is to understand your energy performance of your building, not necessarily doing a detailed renovation at this point.”

Middlebrooks said Autodesk has Cloud based tools that allow you to take those simplified models and run them through site specific, location specific analysis.

“It gathers together climactic data to help you understand how the building is performing, or should be performing, based on historical data. You can correlate that with the energy data that you do have.”

Middlebrooks said the whole concept behind Building Infor­mation Modeling (BIM) is a holistic approach to design simulation and analysis.

“So instead of deciding whether you want to do a window im­provement project and having to justify it on its own, what you want to do is look at a building as a holistic project so that you can say if I’ve got $100,000 to spend, or if I’ve got $200,000 to spend, where should I apply that? Should I apply it to roof insula­tion? Should I apply it to daylight potential, should I add these kinds of improvements?

“And whether it is vestibules or alternative windmills on the roof or solar, there are different approaches at each site, in each locality that offers the best potential. And you have to look at your building holistically to be able to do that.

“So BIM allows you to look at not just the discrete piece, but how the entire building relates to its elements, relates to its envi­ronment, relates to its location, and basically how you can compare and contrast. And the next iteration of that is problem solving.”

To recap that: model your existing buildings, analyze them for energy use and potential and then prioritize where you are going to focus your money on.