Bringing Clarity to the OSS-Powered Smart Grid

Energy is in the crossfire of mighty political forces. On the one side are the Jetsons, those clean and efficient fashionistas who one day hope to whiz around the metropolis in mini-flying saucers powered by carbon neutral fuel cells.

Then there are the residents of California and other electric-power-starved nations where frequent brownouts have turned "energy" into a huge quality of life issue.

But no matter where you sit in the energy debate, you will certainly be affected by smart grids.

Smart grids are the power industry equivalent of telecom's transformation from good-old-boy POTS club to today's broadband, everybody's invited, never-sleep, rock and roll party.

Telecoms were forced to evolve into a distributed, interconnect model due to deregulation and the rise of the intelligent network. The power industry now seems to be following that same course.

All told, industry experts expect a few trillion dollars will be invested to reengineer the power industry for the grids that will enable and coordinate all those electric cars, wind farms and solar energy fields we've been hearing about.

To find out what all this smart grid nonsense is about we contacted Tony Kalcina, founder, chief product officer and chief evangelist of Clarity International in Australia.

As far as we can tell, Kalcina's interests in the smart grid are strictly apolitical. But when Kalcina dreams of the smart grid, he does see "green." Except that it's the monetary type of green — dollar bills, or the Down Under version of the same.

In fact, Kalcina believes OSS software will supply a lot of the "smarts" for the smart grid, which is precisely why we at TRI wanted to talk to him:

The term "smart grid" has crept into our vocabulary, Tony, but I'm not quite sure what it is precisely. Can you help define it for us?

When you hear the term "smart grid,” the first thing that comes to mind is offering electric power customers flexible billing rates and incentives to promote efficient energy use. But that’s a relatively easy issue to solve. The hard part is actually controlling electricity flow and managing the generating capacity.

Here's the key problem: The power industry invests billions of dollars a year in infrastructure just to be ready for those few peak days a year when the power consumption spikes up and most brownouts occur. You know the time periods I'm talking about. It’s 5 p.m. on the hottest day of the summer. Dad and Mom are home from work and the electric grill, air conditioner, television and electric car charging in the garage are all sucking up power like there's no tomorrow.