The first issue is whether "low income" also means "technology challenged." I would assume that in the future, many low income people would not be technology challenged. Also, as the background indicates, the technology must not only address the washing machine and thermostat, but also the solar cells on the roof, the batteries and geothermal heating system in the basement, and the PEV in the driveway. Hopefully, in the future, these technologies will reach sufficiently low cost to be ubiquitous, even in low income households.
The items being interfaced to the grid have much longer planned lifetimes than communications technology, that advances at a rapid pace. This suggests the desirability of separating the device functional interface (e.g., on, off, mode selection) from a communications/control interface that could be upgraded or replaced as its technology advances.
Both the applicance manufacturers and the relevant legislation call for use of "open standards." There are at least a dozen definitions of open standards that have been proposed by various organizations and individual experts. I raised the issue of open standards in my comments on the Framework/Roadmap. There is a Federal definition of "voluntary consensus standard" but no definition of "open standard". In its response to my comments, NIST chose the definition that was most permissive of SDO practices that restrict/encumber visibility into their processes, access to their documents, and implementation/use of their technology. The definition selected by NIST essentially defines a voluntary consensus standard as being an open standard. However, the two are not synonyms, and consumer site standards should be subject to much more serious open standards requirements.
The technology selected for the consumer site should be in the mainstream of available open standards definitions. An example would be public visibility during development, all documents freely downloadable from the internet, royalty-free/unencumbered implementation by anyone, and serious avoidance of any proprietary preference in the underlying technology.
An example of a ubiquitous open standards technology that could satisfy the needs of appliances, distributed resources, and PEVs is available in suggestions regarding "61850-Lite" that is a "discussion item" in the EPRI Report to NIST. Such a standard could be built on the application of web services (XML) communications to a 61850 object model found in the wind power extension to 61850, specifically in 61400-25-4 Annex A. The object model is extensible. It is compatible with 61850, which will be used for DER and likely for PEV. The web services standards are openly published by W3C and implementations are broadly available, including open source implementations. All that would be needed to develop the standard is to identify the initial set of data objects and supporting 61850 services.
The 61850 technology is self-describing, a necessary prerequisite for plug-and-play. Some negotiation functionality might need to be added, but that is an issue commonly addressed in plug-and-play systems. A greater concern might be security, where an unskilled person could be more easily "social engineered" into establishing a dangerous configuration (assuming the default configuration is itself secure).
Regarding gateways/adapters, the utility should probably make a baseline capability available that the consumer could optionally replace with a more sophisticated capability.
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