IntelliGrid Project Scope

The scope of IntelliGrid Architecture project, by definition, must consider the entire energy enterprise: the power engineering and information technology/distributed computing elements. Since the distributed computing systems must support both power engineering applications and information systems, the requirements for the future distributed computing system are subordinate to the needs of the power engineering and business support systems and to the system management functions. IntelliGrid Architecture is required to integrate customer interaction, power system monitoring and control, energy trading, and business information systems. It will reach across customers, feeders, substations, control centers and energy traders.

IntelliGrid Architecture is a roadmap for a next generation power system consisting of automated transmission and distribution systems that support efficient and reliable supply and delivery of power. The goal is to create a power system capable of handling emergency and disaster situations, while also able to accommodate current and future utility business environments, market requirements, and customer needs.

“We have a digital economy and we're still trying to provide power to it through a mechanical design system that was designed over 50 years ago. It is a marvelous system, but we've been effectively borrowing against the future to pay for the present, and the future has caught up with us, we need to build the system to serve the digital society of the 21st century.

...And it's then the controllability of that system. Once we have those digital controls in, we can instantaneously manage the power system so it is self healing, that is it can detect instantaneously a difficulty and correct for it locally so that cascading effects can be eliminated and fundamentally improve the reliability of the system so that computers and other sensitive equipment that has come in over the last decade [are] not upset by power disturbances.”[2]

Project Description

The IntelliGrid Architecture project has set forth the following high-level objectives for defining an Enterprise Architecture:

1.     Develop a complete set of systems requirements and architecture documents to support an industry-wide enterprise architecture for the self-healing grid and integrated consumer communications interface.

2.     Contribute project results, as appropriate to relevant Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and industry consortia to effectively move the development of key open standards forward toward a robust industry infrastructure.

3.     Apply systems engineering concepts to architecture development including, but not limited to, the elicitation and management of system requirements, analysis of requirements, development of proposed architectural designs, evaluation of architectural designs, and use of standardized industry notation for documentation of architectural views.

4.     Identify the potential for infrastructure sharing and synergy between power engineering operations and other application domains.

Objectives and Results of the IntelliGrid Project

As seen in Figure 5, the development of IntelliGrid Architecture focused on two primary project results, together called the IntelliGrid Architecture Framework. These results are described in more detail in the following sections.