NIST awards $8.5 million contract to develop standards for smart grid

The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced on Friday that it has awarded a Tennessee firm a contract to help develop interoperability standards for the nation's next-generation electric grid.

Knoxville-based EnerNex Corp. received the contract, which includes a base period of six months and two options, the first for six months and then one year. The ceiling for the base period is $2.3 million while the entire contract is worth up to $8.5 million.

President Obama has said repeatedly that upgrading the nation's electric grid is a priority for his administration. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes nearly $3.3 billion in smart grid technology development grants and $615 million for testing such technologies. EnerNex will establish a Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Panel, which will identify and prioritize guidelines for the project.

According to Dean Prochaska, national coordinator of smart grid performance at NIST, EnerNex will run the panel, which will comprise both public and private stakeholders including representatives from utility companies, the information technology community, state agencies, the Energy Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The panel is the second phase of a three-step process. First, NIST officials identified smart grid standards that already exist and worked with utility companies and international standards development organizations to collect data and create a roadmap for the work that needs to be done. NIST hosted three public workshops, which brought together more than 1,500 participants to help identify existing standards.

The smart grid panel will examine those standards and attempt to identify gaps that could prevent portions of the grid, which might be separated by provider or geography, from communicating with one another. Prochaska compared the challenge to combining several distinct computer networks.

"As we look at the smart grid, we basically said we need to overlay a two-way communications network on top of the existing electricity grid," he said. "In order to achieve what smart grid is trying to achieve, [you have to] develop systems with two-way communications and two-way electricity flow."

EnerNex also will be involved in the third phase of the process, developing a framework for the testing and certification of smart grid applications. Cybersecurity is one of the biggest challenges to implementing a nationwide smart grid, since any such system presumably would be vulnerable to hackers or enemy states. Prochaska said security is one of NIST's top priorities as it develops standards for smart grid systems.

NIST spokesman Mark Bello said Recovery Act grants have sparked commercial interest in developing smart grid applications as well as some urgency for the project. The grid could generate billions of dollars in potential savings, he said.

"This [contract] is really building infrastructure for an advanced grid," Bello said. "Infrastructure is always important, but sometimes it gets down in the weeds."