Handling Risk Management and Living System Smart Grid Stillborn Threats

Posted At : August 31, 2010 7:47 PM | Posted By : Jose Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio
Related Categories: Business & Corporate, Communications & Security, Customer Care, Demand Response, General, Grid Operations, Industry Structure, Information Technology, Metering, Policy, Regulatory & Legal, Risk & Operations

SmartGridNews.com has a video and an article of the security expert Andy Bochman about two Smart Grid Stillborn Threads. To handle those threats, the electric power industry needs to be restructured with an EWPC-AF based Energy Policy Act.

A few days ago, I posted a comment under the video Smart Grid Security Standards May Be Asking the Impossible of Utilities, with a title "Was Whole Power System Architecting Bypassed?" Today, I read his blog post "Security isn’t the Biggest Threat to the Smart Grid," and I will show that those two threats have to do with the architecture of the whole electric power industry, on risk management and its living system aspects.

The reason the security (risk) threat is greater than necessary is explained in the section “Transportation Ultraquality is the Province of Engineers Not Politics,” of the 2007 EWPC article Demand Integration is NOT the Province of Politics. System security and system adequacy risk management requirements were not fully addressed in the explicit high level architecture act of “The Integrated Energy and Communication Systems Architecture (IECSA)” design work, which concentrated on interoperability.

Based on his article, I agree with Andy that "... it’s a potential public perception that promised Smart Grid benefits aren’t nearly worth the costs that could kill it before it's born." He "... want to focus on the security challenges facing the Smart Grid, but won't be able to do that for long if we don't get the thing fielded in the first place." Architecting evidence in support of the urgent need to restructure the electric power industry can be found in the EWPC article Should the Smart Grid be a Technological Project to Address a Challenge Faced by Utility Executives?.

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