ITU was asked to accelerate work in the area of smart grid at a meeting of industry executives in Geneva in October 2009. Agreement between ITU members to push forward work in this area was reached at a January 2010 meeting of the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG).
ITU’s new focus group, chaired by Les Brown, will explore the requirements of the smart grid that consist of systems based on both current and future telecommunication technologies for command and control, metering, and charging, and find the corresponding standards needs.
Many governments have earmarked portions of their stimulus packages for smart grids. In the US the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has allocated $4.5bn for investments in the smart grid.
In Europe, the European parliament has approved an agreement reached by the EU institutions on a package of legislation to liberalize energy markets, including electricity and gas directives, which require EU member states to ‘ensure the implementation of metering systems’.
The focus group on smart grid will survey existing national standards initiatives to see whether these can be adopted at an international level, and will also perform a gap analysis to identify new standardization requirements that will then be taken forward by relevant ITU-T study groups.
This exploratory phase will be relatively short before work starts on the development of the standards necessary to support the global rollout of smart grid technologies.
In the field of smart grids, ITU has agreed on specifications for smart grid products for home networks. The specifications include a profile that will allow multiple manufacturers to develop products that deliver the low power consumption, low cost, performance, reliability, and security that is required for smart grid and other lower bit rate applications.
Members of HomeGrid Forum, an independent body set up to promote ITU-T’s home networking standard, G.hn, are active participants in smart grid standardization efforts worldwide, including those led by NIST, IEEE, ISO/IEC, and SAE.
