Beyond the Smart Grid : Building Networks

Most effort to date on the “Smart Grid” has focused on what is possible in the near term, with today’s technology and paradigms, for the most part on how to bring the power of information technology to existing functionalities. This is absolutely necessary, but a parallel effort is required to assess and design what is needed in the long term). The long term will bring more capable hardware, new paradigms of communication and control, and different needs and expectations of human beings. This paper presents some key design goals and considerations that our future “building networks” should have, their relationship to the meter and grid, and some proposed architectural principles. It also outlines key near-term research needs so that we can develop and demonstrate early versions as soon as possible. Some key principles are distributed intelligence, the meter as a “narrow waist”, people as nodes on the network, local control (ceding to central authority as needed) and universal interoperability.