Q & A with cat herder Erich Gunther

Phil Carson | Apr 26, 2010

 

He's everywhere, seemingly in perpetual motion. Erich Gunther, chairman and chief technical officer at EnerNex Corp., wears one hat most would not envy: leader of stakeholder relationship management for the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP).

When Congress, in its Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA 2007) directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to launch smart grid-related standards work, the latter formed the SGIP. The SGIP was first led by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), then EnerNex Corp. took the prime contractor position.

I caught up with Gunther at the IEEE PES 2010 conference in New Orleans last week - literally, nabbed him on the show floor - and, like a good sport, he answered a few basic questions and filled me in on the latest. 

Why smart grid now? What's really driving this sea change in how utilities operate?

"The nature of big iron is longevity but even before 'smart grid' came along, we had an aging infrastructure coupled with growing load," Gunther told me. "We may become more efficient with smart grid technologies, the age of grid components is an issue.

"In many parts of the country - California especially - there is incredible resistance to building any new infrastructure, such as new generation. So something's gotta give. Resistance to new infrastructure drives you to get more out of assets you have in place.

"Squeezing more out of the system is a good thing," Gunther added. "But sooner or later all those other things [such as new sources of power generation and more transmission capacity] need to be done.

"Smart grid technologies can be used, initially, to defer some of those needs and to enable, for example, distributed generation. Wind, for instance, requires that we develop situational awareness to match its variable nature to variable load. The solution has to be a mix."

For the record, what are the drivers for standards and interoperability?

"The purpose of interoperability is to allow us to buy 'best of breed' equipment to deploy where needed, so we can take maximum advantage of innovative companies building solutions for every part of the power system and allow them to be integrated in a vendor-independent way," Gunther stated emphatically. "That's counter to the way the industry operated for a long time.

"Over the past ten years I've been working with utilities to understand the value of getting away from 'vendor lock-in.' Many of the organizations I've helped create were originated to help the utilities tell the vendors, 'Hey folks, we're not just going to take what you create anymore, here are our requirements.'"

"I trace a lot of this back to August 14, 2003 - the Northeast blackout," Gunther said. "That got folks looking at infrastructure and brought renewed interest in demand response, in merging communications systems with power systems.

"The blackout also got folks analyzing the failures. We identified where advanced communications and other technologies could have helped. We learned the importance of time-stamping. We didn't have good situational awareness. Somebody has used this analogy: think about driving down the road when you only open your eyes every four to ten seconds. That's how we drive the power system. With phasor measurement units, for instance, our eyes are open most of the time, except for the occasional blink."

The second half of this interview will run tomorrow. Please check back in for Gunther's take on herding cats and what's new with the SGIP.

Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757