There is a growing anxiety that smart meter deployment being stimulated by Federal stimulus money and pressure to move faster from state utility regulators will swamp the data boat of many, if not most, utilities. As I started digging into this issue I quickly discovered I was not the only one, nor the first, to raise it. Last May, Beth Pariseau wrote extensively on this Smart Grid storage topic for Searchstorage.com. [1]
It turns out that I have a personal connection to two of the utilities most often cited on the smart meter front: Austin Energy and PG&E. Having once managed Austin Energy and Austin Water when I was Assistant City Manager for Utilities and Finance in Austin Beth’s interview with current Austin Energy’s CIO, Andres Carvallo piqued my interest. Compared to the data management issued Austin faced when I was there the expected usage trends with smart meters are staggering. My other connection to this issue is through PG&E, my energy provider here in the San Francisco Bay area. Recently, PG&E installed a smart meter from Silver Spring Network on my house. So here is the essence of Beth’s data tsunami story as represented by these two smart grid leaders.
The 400 MB Per Smart Meter Data Storage Requirement
At Austin Energy which is finishing the roll-out of its first 500,000 meters, the annual increase in data storage grew to 200 TB from 20 TB including disaster recovery backup for 15 minute meter sampling for the first stage residential integration. More frequent meter data sampling dramatically scale the data requirements. Austin’s experience to date suggests that storage of about 400 MB per meter per year are required minimally for the 15 minute sampling standard. The Pacific Gas and Electric experience was comparable adding 1.2 PB of meter data storage for its initial 700,000 smart meters rollout or about 170 MB per meter per year sufficient for a twice daily meter sampling.
The 100 Petabyte Smart Meter Storage Need and Growing
In August 2009 FERC issued its “Assessment of Demand Response and Advanced Metering” offering two scenarios for smart meter deployment data requirements. Scenario 1 was a partial rollout of 80 million meters with and the full deployment scenario 2 of 140 million meters by 2019. Based upon the Austin Energy and PG&E experience, the FERC study suggests the need for roughly 100 PB of information within the next ten years.
Think about it this way for comparison: 1 PB=1 quadrillion bytes; or 1 PB=data filling 20 million four drawer filing cabinets filled with text files.
Data Tsunami Ahead to Make Smart Grid Work
Obviously big network and storage providers are rubbing their hands together in glee at the prospect of suctioning up a big share of the money to be spent on smart meters. Utilities, on the other hands, must be wondering whether smart grid is really a dumb idea especially if they try to do it “on the cheap” with low frequency sampling. Just like our own home computer experience, I predict that the roll out of smart meters will lead to the insatiable appetite for more and more and more storage, frequency sampling and applications to make use of this tsunami of data coming our way. Otherwise, why bother.
Hackers See Smart Grid as the Ultimate Video Game
And if you think just the demand for additional data storage is the biggest problem facing smart grid rollouts, they you just have not heard about the smart grid data hackers. At a utility security conference this past summer, one security firm set up a graphic simulation showing how simple it would be to take over the smart grid today. Their simulation showed how over 24 hours an average hacker could gain access and control over about 15,000 out of 22,000 homes by infecting their smart meters with a worm that captured control over the device. Great, you say, just let the utility send the hacker your next utility bill and see how they like it!
But Terrorists See Smart Grid as their Ticket to Ride the Grid
But the problem is there are a lot of bad guys out there who are quite capable of using that control to do serious damage to our critical infrastructure. This is the nightmare scenario for Federal , State and Utility security officials—a cyber attack. That is why FERC has set out a set of critical infrastructure protection rules that require utilities to beef up their security. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is working actively to tighten the nation’s critical infrastructure protection standards. [2] The Federal stimulus grants for smart meter installation all come with regulations requiring utilities to take proactive and immediate steps to boost security. The question is whether the advances of smart grid technology will actually make us more vulnerable to these kinds of cyber attacks than the good old dumb meters that controlled nothing but our utility bill.
So what?
One more thing to think about, not only will you have to pay for all these smart meters and the data storage to keep up with the vast amount of information they produce, but now you have to pay for the security needed to keep some terrorist or teenage mutant ninja hacker from attacking your smart meter or worse the smart grid.
It makes you long for the good old days when all the terrorists did was toilet paper your front yard or egg the car windows.
[1] http://searchstoragechannel.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid98_gci1355355,00.html[2] http://www.nist.gov/testimony/2009/cyber%20sec-smart%20grid%20house%20hs%20hearing%20furlani%20final.pdf
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