As part of its broadband hearings, the FCC looked at whether it should follow …
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission joined the alphabet soup of federal agencies that's contemplating what its role might be in bringing our electric grid a bit of intelligence. It's not unreasonable—smart grid devices are all about starting a two-way conversation between utilities and their distribution equipment and end-user devices. But the FCC held the hearing as part of its broadband initiative, and the hearings allowed those in the industry to press the Commission to allocate the smart grid a chunk of spectrum in order to provide its components guaranteed wireless broadband.
Not everyone at the hearing felt it was necessary; at least one person providing testimony suggested that existing cellular networks could easily absorb the added bandwidth. But many of those providing testimony pointed out that deadzones and strangled bandwidth might be acceptable to cellular providers, but wouldn't be tolerated by utilities.
The most forceful argument against giving the utilities some of their own spectrum came from Henry Jones of SmartSynch, who said that cellular providers are already giving wireless access to millions of diverse devices around the country. Most of the current smart grid applications require very little bandwidth, and Jones said his calculations indicated that plugging all the potential meters in would only add 0.0002 percent to AT&T's bandwidth requirements. "Allocating scarce resources just for utility purposes is not necessary," he argued, "We already have multiple smart grid broadband networks available."
As someone with an iPhone that routinely drops calls within New York City, I was mystified by Jones using his as an example of just how much bandwidth the wireless networks could provide. At the hearing itself, the claims were met with skepticism by American Electric Power's Jason Griffith, who pointed out that even low-bandwidth cellular service was lacking in a lot of areas served by his utility, which serves the midwest.
In any case, Eric Miller of Trilliant, a maker of smart grid hardware, argued that there's degrees of smart grid, and cellular service won't cut it for all smart grid applications. (Trilliant believes this to the degree that they went out and bought their own wireless provider.) His presentation focused on the likelihood that there will be various degrees of brains in the smart grid, which he referred to as a "multitiered" solution.
As Miller put it, "If it's just metering, bandwidth is fine—it's when you start interacting with customers..." Each potential added feature would add a bit to the requirement. So, demand response, renewable power integration, the automation of distribution equipment—all of these are useful, but each adds significantly to the bandwidth needed (not to mention the security, latency, and reliability requirements).
Are we really likely to want all these capabilities? According to Joby Lafky of GridPoint, we have no choice in the matter: electric vehicles will be on the market in growing numbers within the next few years whether the grid's ready or not. A house with an electric vehicle plugged in would add a demand equal to that of an existing dwelling, and do so for several hours. This is clearly a smart grid use case in the making, as time shifting charging and slowing rates of charge could provide the utilities with a tremendous amount of flexibility when it comes to matching demand. And, as Lafky pointed out, the typical consumer won't notice if a three-hour charge took an extra five or ten minutes.
Although the advocates of dedicated spectrum say they'd be happy to use cellular networks when they made sense, people like Miller and Griffith argued that it will be essential to tailor solutions according to the different requirements. Local meshes that cover a neighborhood with a thousand homes might do fine on unlicensed spectrum, but nobody's going to want to connect that mesh to the utility through a single cellular pipe.
So, they contended, giving the utilities a chunk of the wireless spectrum would allow them to create a network that would be guaranteed to be up to the most demanding tasks: national coverage, low latency, high bandwidth, and complete security. They were also happy to point out that there's a simple place to put this spectrum: Canada has already given its utilities 30MHz of spectrum in the 1.8GHz area, a chunk of the spectrum that the FCC has already reserved for fixed, mobile, and earth-to-space communications.
Assuming the FCC buys into this argument, all they'd have to do is coordinate their decision with the other agencies involved, which an FCC Commissioner happily named at the start of the session: the NIST, DOE, FERC, Department of Agriculture, and EPA. We wish them luck with that.
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