Re: [smartpower-interest] [smartpowerdir] FYI OSTP requests inputonSmartGrid

["Greg Daley" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Michael, 

> it entirely relevant.
> 
> What I have been hearing from the electrical supply people is 
> that they
> think they are going to own and control the SmartGrid, and homeowners
> (i.e. power consumers) will enter the system only from 
> outside.  That's
> one of the reasons some of them think they can do it all on 
> rfc1918 space.
> 
> What we in the network side of things see is what Greg sees. 
> The interaction is going to be between my electric dryer and the
> substation on the next block over.  It matters not at all 
> what the price
> of power is 2-substations over --- what matters is how much I 
> can get at
> *my* house.
> 
> My dryer is willing to be told when to start consuming, but to do that
> it has to be addressable in some way.  Having it poll 
> (because of NAT),
> means that it has to have something alive to do that.  In the middle
> term, that means another wall wart consuming power to no end.
> In the near term, I imagine a smart panel plugged into my old dryer. 
> 
>

So, discussing around my office, it seems that some liked the idea
of prepurchasing the electricity, but asked why not directly contact
the power company over the Internet (e.g. via a WWW page).

There are existing electricity markets which do just that in a "B2B" 
arrangement between transmission/consumption and generation (but not to
end users).
So is it better to build out end-user power purchase and management
infrastructure over the existing internet, Out-of-band from the metering
infrastructure?

Or are there classes of applications which demand interaction with end
systems
based on local information, or more predictable behaviour (etc).

If there's a clear succinct reason why the end user's IP devices have to
interact with
the transmission side infrastructure, it may be worthwhile peddling the
the 
idea to the Meter side people.

Greg

BTW, I think one of the more interesting applications is to sell
a rebate or promise to reduce consumption during periods of high demand.
This would allow people to purchase their remaining electricity at a
lower
tarriff even if the dynamic market price is high.