This posted to smartgrid@ostp.gov by John Teeter, People Power Company
Response to Q1 -- In our opinion, the Smart Meter should not be the primary gateway for residential energy information flow. It is quite possible that the institutionalization of this industry owned element as the primary gateway will be one of the major factors discouraging future transformative innovation by perpetuating the paradigm of the consumer as a utility controlled entity.
Response to Q2 -- The "data gateway" is, in our opinion, a logical element within the evolving energy architecture. As such, the innovative binding of this element to a physical infrastructure is one of the critical points of leverage moving forward. The actual data paths, routing, and communications infrastructures will quite likely be different in different deployment settings. Restricting the data gateway to a physical device that is owned by the energy service provider is likely not the best way to most flexibly and in the most innovative ways, take advantage of these local communications capabilities, nor to provide innovative services to the residential consumer. The integration of the future grid information space with the forthcoming National Broadband Initiative will, in our opinion, further enhance prospects for innovation to a greater degree than the establishment of a parallel (utility) private network reaching to the edge of the residential space.
Response to Q3 -- Alternative architectures are not necessarily the appropriate point of departure for the question. Rather, compare approaches to how we provide the functional elements of the architectures that are agreed upon in the Framework and Interoperabilty effort. This is the core of our response to this RFI. From the technical world, we have seen over the last 40 years that innovation has been strongly influenced by the ability of passionate and motivated people to engage and stimulate technology evolution. The advent of low cost micro processor based systems in the mid 70s provided accessibility that lead to open source implementations of operating systems and services, communications stacks, development tools, and full application and operating system deployments. The 40 year history of these open efforts have led to the demise of closed, proprietary solutions in all areas of technology as the open source efforts showed the way to innovative solutions to problems. The result has been a dramatic increase in innovative technology deployments throughout multiple market domains. Innovations that have been commercialized and furthered, where appropriate, into enterprise quality services.
This affect has been particularly apparent in the area of the internet, where government policy clearly influenced the development of open standards and implementations of those standards that are licensable at little or no cost. The most popular and most innovative features of the internet are either built from, or deployed upon the fruits of these open innovation initiatives. We feel that the BEST way to encourage, support, and to engage innovation in the energy infrastructure is to, similarly, provide strong policy leadership in the area of open source development, public licenses, and strong institutional deployments of open source solutions.
The models for open source initiatives are now firmly documented and understood. Communities in both the public and private sectors are engaged. OSCON (the Open Source Developers Conference) and GOSCON (the Government Open Source Development Conference) both show how it can be done. It is the underlying governmental policy decisions that can provide stimulation and guidance for these efforts.
Our company is committed to engaging this open business model as we deploy edge devices for consumption metering and control in the residential market place. We encourage Open, un-encumbered, standards and specifications within the NIST Framework and Interoperability road-map. At any point that there is protected IP, we foresee an impediment to innovation. The motivations for success of the individuals in this marketplace are still there, we will still have a growing and vibrant marketplace that provides our opportunity to succeed. But we will also have the ability to leverage fully the work of others, to innovate. And future entrepreneurs will be able to build upon our successes with innovations that will further transform the energy infrastructure of America and the world.
John Teeter
No comments:
Post a Comment