Smart Grid Interoperability Standards
July 22, 2011
The American Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently put out an order in which they concluded that there is insufficient consensus for the five smart grid families of standards under consideration. For this reason, the Commission will not institute a rulemaking proceeding at this time with respect to these standards and terminates this docket. In this order, the Commission encourages stakeholders to actively participate in the NIST interoperability framework process to work on the development of interoperability standards and to refer to that process for guidance on smart grid standards
The five families of standards are:
- IEC 61968 and IEC 61970, which provide a Common Information Model necessary for exchanges of data between devices and networks, primarily in the transmission and distribution domains
- IEC 61850, which facilitates substation automation, communication and interoperability through a common data format
- IEC 60870-6, which facilitates exchanges of information between control centers, and
- IEC 62351, which addresses the cyber security of the communication protocols defined by the preceding IEC standards.
