* From: Sean Donelan * Date: Tue Jan 23 15:06:02 2007
What do you do when the electric companies split up again, renumber the meters into different network blocks?
Thanks for the discussion. It's rare I've seen a thread on NANOG that's so pertinent to my own situation. I work for a fairly large utility faced with these very problems. We are developing a ~half $billion project to replace our electric meters with 2-way communicating ones, and have several other things going, such as "intelligent grid" projects that will grow the size of our networks many times over. I've also been on a broadband over power line (BPL) project for a year and a half, and have a good understanding of how & where it works, and where it doesn't. The US electric distribution grid, is, for the most part, quite dumb. There are various SCADA and fault protection systems out there, but not everything is automated, and certainly not everything is covered. For example, when the power goes out somewhere, almost all of the time, we don't know until we receive calls from customers. Not a proactive system. Not the level of service that our customers want. Intelligent communicating meters are at the core of the modernization of the grid (and of utility profits, if you look at it in certain ways). You'll eventually find these meters tied to time-of-use electric rates (more $$$ during peak times), as well as used as part of an overall instrumentation effort of the grid. Demand response is also a piece of that puzzle. Shaving a few megawatts on a hot day by reducing load (think 50,000 thermostats having their temperature settings moved up a few degrees on a really hot day) can mean avoiding building power plant and/or transmission line capacity. The electric meter is potentially the utility's gateway into a neighborhood or home network, and could enable those applications. Instrumentation of the grid will also take sensor nets, on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of endpoints per distribution system. We'll find similar networks in customer homes - the load control boxes, the thermostats, etc., that will extend from our edge. Potentially, hundreds of thousands more networks there. There are some utilities that will use BPL as a partial or whole transport for metering & other utility applications, with the notion that there's enough bandwidth to handle residential access services as well (this will often be via a tenant or other 3rd party). While BPL business cases won't be made without utility applications like meter reading, it's unlikely they'll be made without an access play. The other stuff just doesn't require the bandwidth. Do we need IP all the way to the edge of the network? We don't think so. But the alternatives, such as adding ZigBee mesh networks beyond the IP edge, have their own problems of scale & complexity. I've been following the notion that however far our IP network extends out, IPV4 and RFC1918 have plenty of space for us. I'm reminded by this thread, however, that M&A activities, among others, might one day bite us for making that assumption. -jg