UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center (SMERC) and Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC) announce the
UCLA Smart Grid Thought Leadership Forum
Theme: From Technology to Consumer
April 6, 2011
http://winmec.ucla.edu/smartgrid/2011/
SPEAKERS - We are currently accepting speaker nominations : Nominate a Speaker.
Electric Vehicle Forum - registration to the Smart Grid Forum also allows you to enter Electric Vehicle Forum on the same date.
Current Speakers
| Kevin Dasso | Senior Director of Smart Grid and Technology Integration | Pacific Gas & Electric Company |
| Rajit Gadh | Professor & Director | UCLA - WINMEC & Smart Grid Energy Research Center |
| Robert Greene | VP Product Strategy | Versant Corporation |
| Erfan Ibrahim | Technical Executive | EPRI |
| Lee Krevat | Director - Smart Grid | San Diego Gas & Electric |
| Shuai Lu | Senior Research Engineer | PNNL |
| Emir Macari | Executive Director | Ca Smart Grid Center |
| Ed May | Director Business Development, Smart Grid Solutions | Itron |
| Michael Montoya | Director Engineering Advancement | Southern California Edison |
| Sarah Potts | LA City Director | Clinton Climate Initiative |
| Ted Reguly | Director- Smart Meter Program Office | San Diego Gas and Electric |
| Jason Rodriguez | CEO & Director of Research | Zpryme Research & Consulting, LLC |
| Nancy Ryan | Deputy Executive Director for Policy | California Public Utilities Commission |
| Shirish Sathaye | General Partner | Khosla Ventures |
| Commissioner Timothy Simon | Commissioner | California Public Utilities Commission |
| David Wollman | Manager, Electrical Metrology Groups | NIST |
Speakers from Electric Vehicle Forum
| Michael Stadler | Staff Scientist | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California |
| Jasna Tomic | Fuels Program Manager | CALSTART |
| Diane Wittenberg | Chairman | California Plug-in Vehicle Collaborative |
PARTICIPANTS - At the next UCLA Smart Grid Thought Leadership Forum Series, we will be joined by several leaders from government, utilities, suppliers, and academia.
Sponsor the forum - Limited sponsorship opportunities are available - for further information please contact : sponsor@winmec.ucla.edu
Join UCLA's Smart Grid Energy Research Center (SMERC, http://smartgrid.ucla.edu/) and UCLA WINMEC (http://winmec.ucla.edu/) at its upcoming Smart Grid Thought Leadership Forum. On April 6, 2011, this leadership forum will focus on how technology is gradually changing the electric utility grid resulting in potential changes to what will eventually be seen by consumers as a "Smart Grid."
OPPORTUNITY - The Electric Utility Grid is approximately a hundred years old. The grid architecture is generally hierarchical with a small number of large energy generation sources and a large number of smaller energy demand sinks. Recent energy-centric advances in residential solar rooftops, or, scalable wind-turbine farms, or, electric vehicles charging in the grid, coupled with technological advances in information technology, communications, mobile and wireless and miniature smart sensors and controllers has resulted in an unprecedented opportunity to modernize the grid. However, while renewable energy advances have the potential to create sophisticated and environmentally friendly energy sources and sinks, the grid its would have to be upgraded with the various advanced technologies to make the grid flexible, resilient, robust, reliable, smart, in addition to being consumer friendly.
DEFINING SMART GRID - With numerous debates on trying to define the smart grid, it is becoming increasingly clear that the smart grid needs to be flexible enough to incorporate solar energy in California, or, wind in Texas, or, hydro in New York. Conceptually, a smart grid is an intelligent control system, incorporating concepts such as sense-and-control, communication, information gathering about the precise state of the grid, making decisions on obtaining the power from where it is being created, routing of the power to where it is needed, balancing variations of voltage and frequency where needed, keeping track of assets, while at the same ensuring its own security. A grid that is smart should make decisions based on information and knowledge, learn by experience, self-adapt, self-organize and self-heal. Only with trial-and-error and iterations can we start to understand the complexities of the smart grid and over time perhaps have a more meaningful definition.
INNOVATION VIA TECHNOLOGY- The overwhelming excitement today in the energy transmission and distribution sectors is a result of the potential for innovation that would accompany the process of grid modernization. Other industries such as telecommunications, computing, software, mobile phone, movie, and music have, in the last 25 years, undergone considerable change whereby technologies advances have created new product paradigms coupled with a complete makeover of consumer expectations and behavior.Twenty five years from now, the United States electrical power grid is expected to look very different, and a key question that is being raised is what type of innovative evolution path will it follow. Will it be the iPhone from the mobile industry, or, Facebook from the Internet, or, perhaps a completely new model? Also, what other entirely new innovations will it create? Or on the other hand, will it absorb some of the innovations from other emerging sectors such as Zigbee or RF-sensors from the wireless industry, and, smart phones from the consumer space. No matter which route it takes, it is a foregone conclusion that technological advances are going to result in an ever-changing smart grid.
CONSUMERS - In recent months, consumers have weighed in on their thoughts about smart meters, the grid, their bill, renewable energy and the environment. They have expressed this through their policymakers and lawmakers. Clearly the utilities and policymakers need to understand the consumer, while at the same time educate the consumer about potential benefits of the smart grid. This would be a process of trial and error whereby advanced technological innovations, business models, and, policies would need to advance in synchronization with each other so as to provide maximal benefits to the consumer, for it is only with the input from the consumer that the grid can constantly become smarter than before.
UTILITIES - With a smarter grid, utilities would be able to achieve automation at the distribution and substation levels, thereby helping them maintain a more balanced grid. Such capability coupled with smart meters and refined wide area monitoring would allow utilities to offer more sophisticated pricing plans to their consumers much like shopping malls offer discounts based on demand and supply consideration, and such capability can eventually allow utilities to offer substantially refined and automated demand response services to their customers. Further with consumers installing smart appliances that can communicate with the utilities demand response programs would result in refined planning and control of electricity by the utilities. Finally, as the number of EVs in the utilities' grid increases, the utilities would be able to use the EV's electricity storage capability to balance the grid, stabilize grid voltage and control frequency fluctuations.
PUBLIC POLICY - The success of incentives to consumers such as demand response would depend upon the flexibility that the utilities have in pricing their product much like a retailer can influence sales by marking prices of products up or down. The future of energy pricing would almost certainly be more complex than flat pricing - and a balance would be reached by the customers providing their input via public policy and through electricity regulatory commissions.
CHALLENGES - The innovation, investment and infrastructure could potentially have a 25 year cycle, with the first several years being regional technology demonstrations. One year has passed in the ARRA Smart Grid grants, and the various demonstrations in different parts of the country are teaching us different lessons. The forum will bring together national-level thought leaders to discuss their experiences.
TOPICS (include but not limited to):
- Stimulus ARRA investment - status of progress by utilities
- Advanced Smart Grid Technologies - Communications, Sensors, Controls, Wireless, Mobile, Power Systems, Power Electronics, smart inverters, etc.
- Automated Demand Response - Integration of Consumer's electricity infrastructure with utility's infrastructure in combination with incentive-based pricing
- AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) - Automation at various levels including billing and monitoring, Smart Meter Integration, Meter data management or MDM
- Electric Vehicles - Integration of EV and Battery Technology into a smart grid, charge/discharge, back-fill planning, V2G, G2V, aggregation
- Smart Appliance Integration - Communications interfaces, data formats, sense-control infrastructure, status of universally accepted standards
- Customer and consumer response - Integrating customer response into the technological advancements associated with the smart grid
- Transmission Integration - Bringing Transmission and Distribution Together, Phasor Measurement Units (PMU), Power Quality
- Solar Integration - Solar PVC Integration, Incorporating intermittent source within grid
- Wind Integration - Micro- versus Marco- Wind Mill Technology, Urban versus rural technology
- Energy Storage Integration - Battery, Spinning reserve, pumped storage
- Business Issues - ROI of Smart Grid investments, determining low hanging fruit, measuring benefits
- Modeling and architecture - Hierarchical versus P2P models, Information models, data models, Internet/Wireless Models, RF-sensor models.
- Scaling up - Balancing flexibility and cost with scalability
- Cyber-infrastructure and Cyber-security - NERC CIP, Communications/data/app security, embedded device security, intrusion detection/prevention, layers of security, security policy
- Visions of Smart Grid - From DOE, National Labs, Industry, Utilities, Government
- Open-systems wireless and communications interface software and standards based approach for the Smart Grid of the Future
- Consumer interface - Use of personal mobile device as a tool for interaction with the home electrical control systems
- Standards - at what stage should a given technology be standardized, what should be standardized, and who should be allowed to standardize? Open systems versus open-source. Role of NIST, FERC, NERC, EPRI, SAE, ISO, etc.
- Legislation and its impact on the Smart Grid
What is UCLA WINSmartGridTM - UCLA WINSmartGrid™ is a research technology platform developed at UCLA whose objective is to advance novel Wireless / Communications Sense-and-control Smart Grid technologies, perform testing in the labs, transition technologies into the field for scaled testing, and work with partners in industry and government for demonstrations and eventual rollout. With the WINSmartEV™ research as an underlying theme, other related research activities include:
- Demand Response via monitoring of in-building, in-office and in-home infrastructure and its integration into the Smart Grid
- WINSmartEV™ - UCLA's platform for Electric Vehicle energy monitoring, charge/discharge, back-fill planning, scheduling, and based on wireless sense-and-control technology
- Cyber-security architecture for AMI, DR and EV communications and sense-and-control models
- Communications architecture for Integration of Energy storage
- Minimal delay wireless networks connecting to monitoring infrastructure, and, use of personal mobile device to connect to the wireless infrastructure
- Response of varied pricing signals to automated demand response for consumers and enterprises
- Analysis, visualization and analytics of smart meter data
Registration
To register to attend - http://winmec.ucla.edu/smartgrid/2011-04/registration.asp
Speakers from previous events:
| Vikram Budhraja | President | Electric Power Group |
| Andres Carvallo | Chief Information Officer | Austin Energy |
| Dave Chassin | Staff Scientist | PNNL |
| Luke Clemente | General Manager, Metering & Sensing Systems | GE Energy - Digital Energy |
| Susan Covino | Senior Consultant, Market Strategy | PJM Interconnection LLC |
| Kshamit Dixit | Director of IT Security | Toronto Hydro |
| Bob Frazier | Director of Technology | Houston Electric |
| Rajit Gadh | Director | UCLA WINMEC |
| Livio Gallo | Chief Executive Officer | Enel Distribuzione |
| John Garrity | Manager, RF& Photonics laboratory | GE Global Research |
| Josh Gerber | Lead Architect for Smart Grid | San Diego Gas & Electric |
| Mike Gravely | Manager - Energy Systems Research Office | California Energy Commission |
| Erich Gunther | Chairman and CTO | EnerNex Corporation |
| Aloke Gupta | Energy Analyst | California Public Utilities Commission |
| Marie Hattar | VP, Network Systems and Security Solutions | Cisco |
| Mark Hura | Global Smart Grid Commercial Leader | GE Energy T&D |
| Joel Ibarbia | Senior Consulting Engineer - SmartMeter | PG&E SmartMeter Engineering and Planning |
| Erfan Ibrahim | Technical Executive | EPRI |
| Doug Kim | Director, Advanced Technology | Southern California Edison |
| Lee Krevat | Director - Smart Grid | San Diego Gas & Electric |
| Jayant Kumar | Director, Strategy & Partnership | AREVA T&D Inc |
| Matthew Lampe | Chief Information Officer | Los Angeles Department of Water and Power |
| Zahra Makoui | Supervisor - Smart Grid Communication Standards | Pacific Gas & Electric Co. |
| Jack McGowan | Leader | Galvin Perfect Power |
| Mark McGranaghan | VP | EPRI |
| Michael Montoya | Director Engineering Advancement | Southern California Edison |
| Ali Morabbi | Manager, Power System Information Technology | LADWP |
| John Nelson | Chief, Electricity & Renewables | Defense Energy Support Center |
| Jim Parks | Program Manager, Energy Efficiency and Customer R&D | Sacramento Municipal Utility District |
| Scott Pugh | Science & Technology Directorate | Department of Homeland Security |
| Ted Reguly | Director - Smart Meter Program Office | San Diego Gas and Electric |
| Weston Sylvester | Director Distribution Solutions/Smart Grid | Siemens Energy, Inc. |
| Commissioner Timothy Simon | Commissioner | California Public Utilities Commission |
| Malcolm Unsworth | President & CEO | Itron, Inc. |
| David Watson | Program Manager | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
| David Wollman | Manager, Electrical Metrology Groups | NIST |
See our Previous Events:
2010-11-02: UCLA WINSmartGridTM Connection
2010-09-28: UCLA EV Forum
2010-05-17: UCLA WINSmartGridTM Connection
2009-11-04: UCLA WINSmartGridTM Connection
2009-06-18: WinSmartGridTM Thought Leadership Round Table Forum
2009-03-18: WinSmartGridTM Connection kickoff meeting
Participating in UCLA WINSmartGridTM Connection
Organizations interested in joining the UCLA Wireless SmartGrid Connection should email smartgrid@winmec.ucla.edu
Smart Grid Technology Leadership Council
Select organizations are participating on The UCLA-WINMEC Smart Grid Technology Leadership Council (http://winmec.ucla.edu/advisory-smartgrid.asp). For further information, email smartgrid@winmec.ucla.edu, subject "Smart Grid Technology Leadership Council".
Sponsors:
WINMEC,
Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science,
SMERC,
Clean Tech Los Angeles
Hughes Network Systems,
ISMB,
InterDigital Communications,
Motorola Solutions,
Raytheon,
Tescom Co.
Equipment Sponsors:
Impinj,
RSI ID Technologies,
Printronix,
Maxell,
Motorola Solutions,
Zebra,
Quantum Route, Inc.,
Convergence Systems Limited,
Magellan Technology (Australia),
Confidex,
Alien Technology,
Intemec,
UPM Raflatac,
TagSense,
Albis Technologies,
Metalcraft Inc.,
Roxtron,
Invengo
Media Sponsors:
Smart Grid Conference
UCLA - WINMEC, 44-116S Engr. IV, 420 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA. 90095