NIST Smart Grid and CPS Newsletter - March 2017

Table of Contents

• Transactive Energy Challenge to Unveil Phase II Plans
• Busy Spring and Summer Ahead for Global City Teams Challenge
• Upcoming Meeting: Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT 2017) (Arlington, Virginia, April 23-26, 2017)
• Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Updates

Transactive Energy Challenge to Unveil Phase II Plans

Plans for the NIST Transactive Energy (TE) Challenge Phase II are now in place. The Phase II Challenge will launch with a webinar on April 20, 2017 (Thursday), 1:00-2:30 p.m. ET.  (Registration and agenda details are available online.)

The NIST TE Challenge Phase II aims to engage organizations with interests in TE to develop simulation-platform-agnostic common understandings and interoperable TE modeling approaches.  These common understandings and modeling approaches will allow the broad community of electric grid and systems modelers to incorporate transactive elements into their own analyses. The TE Challenge is designed to facilitate the application of common TE principles that can be explored with integrity across diverse modeling simulation toolsets. Challenge participants will be asked to simulate at least one specified TE use case on a common grid topology to enable comparison of results.

Additional details about Phase II—and the overall Challenge—are posted on the main TE Challenge page.

Key dates for the coming months include the following:

• April 20, 2017: The Phase II Launch webinar will review the TE co-simulation common platform model, a strawman TE Challenge scenario, and plans for collaborative development of that scenario.  
• June 13-15, 2017: The 2017 Transactive Energy Systems Conference and Workshop in Portland, Oregon, will feature team reports and a workshop on the TE Challenge scenario.
• July 25, 2017: Official start of team simulations.
• January 2018: Capstone meeting to share and celebrate.

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Busy Spring and Summer Ahead for Global City Teams Challenge

The next five months will be busy times for the six SuperClusters and the 100+ action clusters involved in NIST’s Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC). These teams are currently engaged in a wide variety of projects and efforts that will be highlighted at the GCTC Expo at the end of the summer. Some preliminary details about the GCTC Expo are now available.  Here’s the important “Save the Date” information:

       2017 GCTC Expo
       August 28-29, 2017
       Walter E. Washington Convention Center
       Washington, D.C.
       (The event website will be available soon.  Stay tuned.)

The SuperClusters—multi-city, multi-stakeholder deployments of smart city projects in sectors such as energy, transportation, and public safety—have been using the first months of 2017 to hold face-to-face workshops. At these workshops, each of the SuperClusters is beginning to develop a high-level blueprint of replicable, scalable, and sustainable projects operating within smart cities, based on successful real-world examples and best practices. These blueprints will be made widely available so that they can be used by cities around the world as a way to jump start their efforts.

The Public WiFi SuperCluster’s face-to-face workshop will meet on May 11, 2017, in San Jose, California.  Four other SuperClusters held their workshops in recent weeks:

• GCTC SuperCluster Workshop on Transportation (Portland, Oregon, February 1-2, 2017)
• GCTC SuperCluster Workshop on City Platform (Kansas City, Missouri, February 7-8, 2017)
• GCTC SuperCluster Workshop on Public Safety/Emergency/Disaster/Resilience (Washington, D.C., March 2-3, 2017)
• GCTC SuperCluster Workshop on Energy/Water/Waste (Atlanta, Georgia, March 22-23, 2017)

The most recent workshop, held in Atlanta last week, was attended by over 100 stakeholders with keynotes from the City of Atlanta, AT&T, and Siemens. During the one-and-a-half-day workshop, the group made significant progress on building the blueprints/playbook for energy, water, and waste management.

For those who would like to stay informed about a specific SuperCluster, five of the SuperClusters have established google groups:

• Energy, Water, Waste Management SuperCluster google group
• Public WiFi SuperCluster google group
• Public Safety, Emergency, Disaster, Resilience SuperCluster google group 
• Transportation Super Action Cluster google group
• Healthcare SuperCluster google group

For further information on the City Platform SuperCluster, please contact Sokwoo Rhee at sokwoo.rhee [at] nist.gov (sokwoo[dot]rhee[at]nist[dot]gov).

During an already-busy spring, there is one additional opportunity to learn about GCTC projects.  The Second International Workshop on Science of Smart City Operations and Platforms Engineering (SCOPE) in partnership with Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC)—SCOPE 2017 with GCTC—is meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 21, 2017.  The meeting is co-located with a number of other organizations who will also be meeting for the 10th Anniversary Cyber-Physical Systems Week.

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Upcoming Meeting: Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT 2017) (Arlington, Virginia, April 23-26, 2017)

Researchers from the NIST Smart Grid team will be presenting a panel, “Innovative Research at the NIST Smart Grid Testbed,” at the Eighth Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT 2017), on Wednesday, April 26, 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. 

NIST performs vital research addressing many of the critical elements that make up the smart grid, and a critical part of this research portfolio is implemented in a newly constructed Smart Grid Interoperability Testbed. The Smart Grid Interoperability Testbed facility creates a unique set of interconnected and interacting labs in several key measurement areas that will accelerate the development of smart grid interoperability standards by providing a combined testbed platform for system measurements, characterization of smart grid protocols, and validation of smart grid standards, with an emphasis on local optimization of grid operations and on microgrids.

Sponsored by the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES), the ISGT conference will be held on April 23-26, 2017, at the Crystal Gateway Marriott, Arlington, Virginia (Washington D.C. Metro Area). The conference will feature plenary sessions, panel sessions, technical papers, and tutorials by experts on grid modernization and smart grid applications and system integration.

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Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Updates

The Electromagnetic Interoperability Issues Working Group (EMIIWG) recently released a white paper and held a webinar on “The Evaluation of the Electromagnetic Phenomena Issues on Smart Grid Reliability.”

The Smart Grid Cybersecurity Committee (SGCC) held a webinar on March 21 on “Cyber-Physical Resiliency.”

Earlier this month, SGIP announced that its members had voted to include five new standards in the SGIP Catalog of Standards (CoS), bringing the total number of standards included in the CoS up to 81.  Each standard in the catalog represents many months of teamwork in SGIP technical working groups and committees. The five new standards are as follows:

• ANSI/ASHRAE/NEMA Standard 201-2016, Facility Smart Grid Information Model (FSGIM) -- This standard provides a common basis for electrical energy consumers to describe, manage, and communicate about electrical energy consumptions and forecasts. SGIP’s PAP-17, with NIST’s Steve Bushby as chair and Marty Burns making important contributions, led SGIP’s work on this standard.
• NEMA Standards Publication SG-IPRM 1-2016, Smart Grid Interoperability Process Reference Manual -- The Interoperability Process Reference Manual (IPRM) defines a process by which industry stakeholders may procure, test, and assert interoperability between disparate vendors of smart grid products to identified standards.  SGIP’s Testing and Certification Committee (SGTCC), with NIST’s Cuong Nguyen as chair, led SGIP’s work on this standard.
• ANSI/CTA-2045, Modular Communications Interface for Energy Management -- This standard provides a modular communications interface (MCI) enabling any product to connect to any type of demand response system and home or building network. This enables communications with residential devices for applications like energy management.
• ITU-T G.9903, Narrowband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Power Line Communication Transceivers for G3-PLC Networks -- This standard specifies the physical layer (PHY) and data link layer (DLL) for the G3-PLC narrowband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) power line communication transceivers. It addresses communications via alternating current and direct current electric power lines over frequencies below 500 kHz.
• NAESB RMQ.26 Model Business Practices (OpenFMB™) -- OpenFMB™ is a framework for utility service providers to securely access grid edge field data and share it between all devices and systems. The Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB™) framework is composed of a reference architecture, framework approach, and implementation best practices.

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