The Emerging Enernet: Convergence of the Smart Grid with the Internet of Things

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the ethernet and wellknown technology visionary, once said, "Over the past 63 years, we met world needs for cheap and clean information by building the Internet. Over the next 63 years, we will meet world needs for cheap and clean energy by building the Enernet." The Internet has resulted from revolutionary advances in electronics, telecommunications and information technologies, devices and applications. While it began as an Internet connecting people, by 2008 it connected more things than people. Its exponential growth has been primarily as an Internet of Things. Cisco has predicted that 50 billion new connections will be made in this Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020. The U.S. electric utility grid has until now been a patchwork of monolithic, weakly interconnected, synchronous AC grids powered by a few thousand or so very large power plants that are centrally monitored and controlled. For a variety of reasons this legacy grid approach is proving to be non-viable for the present and the future. It is being supplemented and may ultimately be supplanted by many, smaller networks with literally millions of distributed generation, storage, and energy management nodes. The grid is literally exploding into a network of things. Many consider it to be the largest example of an Internet of Things. The Enernet will be the inevitable convergence of the smart grid with the Internet of Things. Utilities, their customers and non-utility will find it necessary to plan, engineer and operate in the presence of orders of magnitude more devices and systems (e.g., smart nodes on the utility systems and, for consumers, smart thermostats, appliances, PHEVs/EVs, distributed generation / storage, premises monitoring, automation, and EMS, even transactive energy markets) ultimately leading to billions of new points that require monitoring, analysis and management. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things steadily grows more ubiquitous, powerful, economical and secure. It is an obviously attractive platform for the smart grid or, as Metcalfe has said, the control plane for the smart grid. The purpose of this paper is to discuss why and how the production and utilization of electric energy will become inseparable, even indistinguishable from the Internet of Things.