Future Electric Power Industry and Grids—Now What Again is Our Destination?
Having a vision that others agree to support and work toward is highly desirable but hard to achieve. We seem to lack a common and shared understanding of the vision—or worse, multiple visions (vivid mental images or documented statements) with varying areas of focus and details: • some appear to be similar but have differing underlying goals and characteristics, or • some reflect differing viewpoints as to effects on various stakeholders. These desirable and undesirable situations apply to realizing visions for enterprise and industry, including the electricity sector. Multiple industry stakeholder groups have developed goals, industry vision statements, and characterizations of the future. The viewpoints are promoted, discussed, refined by their stakeholder group, and often published to promote broad understanding and to inform or influence others. The GridWise Architecture Council asked itself how well-aligned these characterizations of the future are. If these publications collectively set the overall direction for the industry, it is useful to identify their answers to questions such as, where is the electric industry headed, guided by what objectives, and with what role(s) for the customers, electric utilities, and other stakeholders? Are these goals, visions, and future states moving toward a common vision, do they provide value for the stakeholders, and are they likely to meet the objective stated? This paper addresses these questions via an assessment and characterization of a sampling of stakeholder groups’ publicly available vision and future state reports for the electricity industry. Identified electric power grid architectural topic areas needing further work are described, along with GridWise Architecture Council analysis and observation, potential collaborative work efforts, and suggested next steps.