IEEE releases smart-grid standard
     April 23, 2012 - IEEE announced the publication of a new standard, as well as the launch of three new standards-development activities, all designed to enhance the communications and distribution-automation capabilities of the smart grid globally.

  “Many of the benefits that the world hopes to achieve throughsmart-grid development—such as empowering greater consumer choice in energy use, improving the reliability of power generation and distribution and more efficiently meeting skyrocketing power demand—are dependent on integrating significantly more robust systems for communications and distribution automation,” saidDr. W. Charlton Adams Jr., past president of the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA).“The new standards activities approved by the IEEE-SA Standards Board are designed to enhance those very capabilities—and, in doing so, accelerate realization of the smart grid’s revolutionary promise.”

 IEEE-SA has published IEEE 1591.1-2012 – Standard for Testing and Performance of Hardware for Optical Ground Wire (OPGW). OPGW is being used in the smart grid to provide both grounding capabilities for transmission lines and communications back to utility systems such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA). IEEE 1591.1 provides manufacturing, testing and procurement specifications for use with OPGWhardware.The new standard is available for purchase at the IEEE Standards Store.Smart-grid standards projects newly approved by IEEE-SA include the following:

 IEEE P1909.1–Recommended Practice for Smart Grid Communication Equipment -Test methods and installation requirements – is intended to document testing and installation procedures that are geared specifically for communications equipment to be installed in various domains of the smart grid, such as generation, transmission and distribution. Safety, electromagnetic capability (EMC), environmental and mechanical tests are to be covered in the recommended practice, toward the goal of improving the safety and reliability of a wide range of smart-grid communications equipment.

 IEEE P1703–Standard for Local Area Network/Wide Area Network (LAN/WAN) Node Communication Protocol to complement the Utility Industry End

 Device Data Tables – is intended to improve the cost efficiency and flexibility of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments. The standard is being developed to define uniform, managed, adaptive and secure networkdata and message delivery for plug-and-play, multi-source utility meters, home appliances, communication technology and other ancillary devices.

IEEE P1854– Guide for Smart Distribution Applications Guide – is being developed to categorize and describe important smart distribution applications and fill a gap for standardized definitions of such systems. The guide is intended to cover advanced automation and SCADA systems for reliability improvement, outagemanagement, faultlocation and management, voltage and var management, distributed-resource and renewable-generation integration, demand response, advanced protection, equipment diagnostics and asset management, real-time simulation for system optimization, microgrids and many other applications.