What Is the Smart Grid?
The Smart Grid is a convenient term to describe the modernization of electric, natural gas, and water grid infrastructures. The term encapsulates the convergence of remote monitoring and control technologies with communications technologies, renewables generation, and analytics capabilities so that previously noncommunicative infrastructures like electricity grids can provide time-sensitive status updates and deliver situational awareness.
While initially and mostly focused on electricity, many of the same technologies, particularly in information and communications technologies (ICTs), apply to natural gas and water grids. This book addresses privacy in all three of these consumables, but electricity occupies a unique place by virtue of the fact that we can produce it as well as consume it. In addition, existing technologies make it easier to get many more measurements about electricity than gas or water.These two unique qualities about electricity have very interesting ramifications for privacy, and therefore this book will refer to electricity and electricity use cases because they provide the best frameworkfor discussion of this important topic.
Changes from Traditional Energy Delivery
One of the other critical ramifications of the Smart Grid is that it changes the supply chain. The traditional view is that electricity, gas, or water is supplied by a utility to consumers, and on a periodic basis, your consumption is metered and you pay a bill for the amount you consume, typically at a flat rate. Many technologies in the Smart Grid now make consumption a new point in the supply chain, and when itcomes to electricity, new technologies make it a value chain. Electricity has a special distinction in the Smart Grid.* Consumers can become prosumers—producing consumers—of electricity. We can generateelectricity on our rooftops or backyards and sell kilowatts back to a utility or use it ourselves to reduce the amount we buy from a utility.We can also participate in programs that encourage us to reduce our electricity use, thereby generating negawatts, or watts of energy saved through a reduction in energy use or increase in energy efficiency.†
We don’t have the same range of possibilities to create water or natural gas, which is why electricity occupies the unique status of elevating us to prosumers. Water and gas meters are much simpler in designand metrology (what is measured) than electricity too. However, Smart Grid technologies definitely change what can be determinedabout our consumption of electricity, natural gas, and water. Thinkabout it this way. Suppose you went to a grocery store and just walked out of the store with a reusable canvas bag full of items every day. At the end of the month, you received a bill with a single-line descriptorfor “groceries” and a total amount of money owed. That’s it. No identification of how many quarts of milk, pounds of bananas, or boxesof cereal that you consumed that month. That’s how we currently get electricity, gas, and water bills.
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