GridWeek 2012 in Washington, D.C., gathered executives and smart grid experts from around the industry to swap advice and predictions about what utilities can expect for the future of transmission technology. Whatever the world of electricity looks like a decade from now, experts agree that there is going to be data involved—and Wi-Fi Alliance Technical Director Greg Ennis has a clear idea about the role he would like to see Wi-Fi play.

Utility Dive sat down with Ennis for a few minutes during GridWeek to talk about what the Wi-Fi Alliance is currently working on, as well as how he sees Wi-Fi fitting in with the evolving grid. He laid out his vision for interoperable Smart Energy Profile 2 (SEP 2) products, in addition to walking us through the benefits of Wi-Fi capabilities for municipal services and utilities.

What follows is a portion the conversation we had with him:

UTILITY DIVE: Do you see Wi-Fi playing the biggest role in homes, or are there any places between the home and the point of generation where it’s also going to be important for the future of the smart grid?

ENNIS: Definitely. Neighborhood area network—there are definitely uses of Wi-Fi in that environment. Wi-Fi in metropolitan areas—what has been happening is [with] a lot of the networks that have been put in, municipalities have been realizing that it makes sense to support public services. You know, like fire and police services. So supporting smart grid applications on Wi-Fi networks like that makes a lot of sense.

Also, one of the advantages of using Wi-Fi in that environment is for the mobile workers doing maintenance. To the extent that Wi-Fi is used as communication, then you can have iPad and smartphone apps specific to the utilities that directly communicate with their equipment out there, because the Wi-Fi is built into the smartphone. You don't have to have some special device with some special technology.

There's point-to-point uses of Wi-Fi for backhaul, so yeah, Wi-Fi is used in all different aspects.

So what do you see as the biggest issues for utilities right now as they implement Wi-Fi tech throughout the grid?

ENNIS: Most of the infrastructure that’s in place now is implementing 802.11n, which is the generation of Wi-Fi that came out several years ago and provides hundreds of megabits of data—and also is something that is particularly good at reaching kilometer ranges [compared to] previous generations of Wi-Fi. So that’s the infrastructure that’s typically being deployed and has been deployed for the past number of years now and that is absolutely well-suited to the utility applications today.

There is a new generation of Wi-Fi coming out, 802.11ac, that is going to be very important within residential environments for home entertainment and very high-speed applications like that.

Is that because you have so many entertainment devices sharing bandwidth with one other? What’s the biggest impact that has on, say, smart meter-to-utility communication and customer-to-smart meter communications?

ENNIS: The impact that that has on the smart energy space is that it just means that there’s going to be more and more user devices implementing Wi-Fi, and they’ll implement it for these high-performance entertainment applications, so televisions and tablets and these kinds of things. But that Wi-Fi that they’re implementing is interoperable with other devices implementing Wi-Fi, so even though those other devices are putting in this real high-performance stuff, it’s able to communicate with sensors or with energy gateways or energy management systems that might not need that kind of high data rate—but still, it’s interoperable with your television set. You can use that as an in-home display because the Wi-Fi is interoperable with all those devices.

When you come out here to GridWeek, who’ve you been talking and what have you been most interested in seeing that’s going on right now in the decisions being made?

ENNIS: Well, it’s not just at Gridweek. You’re going to see that the Wi-Fi Alliance is very involved in SEP 2 (Smart Energy Profile 2). In fact, we’re actively working on a certification program for SEP 2 devices, so that’s kind of the focus I’ve had, not just at other conferences.

The major appliance manufacturers, I’m talking the Samsungs, the LGs, the Whirlpools—they are putting Wi-Fi into their appliances, but it’s not for smart energy. It’s because they have all these other applications that they want connectivity for. So for example customer service, remote diagnostics, you know there’s some types of appliances where user-internet connectivity is important.

They want to build an ecosystem that encourages customers to buy more products that fit into it.

ENNIS: Right. So these appliances are coming out with Wi-Fi, so now smart energy applications, like SEP 2, becomes just another application running on top of that physical connectivity that’s already in place. So you don’t have to put in some kind of a new technology into the appliance in order to support smart energy apps. You’ve already got that built in there for other reasons, and now it’s just adding an application to support SEP 2, to support energy monitoring, energy management, etc.

That’s something that people in the smart energy space don’t tend to recognize—that smart energy is really just one app among these appliance manufacturers and not necessarily the most important one for them.

So tell me a little bit about exactly what SEP 2 is.

ENNIS: Smart Energy Profile 2. This is what’s being universally adopted for in-premise smart energy applications.

SEP2 provides things like demand response, load control, energy monitoring, dynamic pricing. And there’s a variety of SEP 2 configurations that are possible. One of them is where the utility will communicate with the SEP 2 devices in the home through their AMI network, through the meter, but another is Internet connectivity where you've got the third-party or the utility applications communicating with the home devices via the Internet, so both of those configurations are incorporated into the SEP 2 spec.

With Wi-Fi implementations of SEP 2, the Wi-Fi Alliance has been staging public demonstrations of Wi-Fi based interoperability of multiple SEP 2 implementations. We did one in Chicago a year ago in August, we did one at Distributech in January.

The other important thing with SEP 2 here is this collaboration between the Wi-Fi Alliance, the ZigBee Alliance and the HomePlug Alliance to ensure interoperability of SEP 2 implementations no matter which underlying connectivity technology is being used. And so in fact the three alliances back in October of last year, or September, formed the Consortium for SEP 2 Interoperability (CSEP)—it’s like an alliance of alliances, and the focus of CSEP is to develop a common test plan that all three alliances can use to certify the SEP 2 devices implemented over the different technologies, and to make sure that they’re all interoperable and that they work together.

So the way this works is that the individual member companies of these alliances can all participate within CSEP. In fact, there’s over 40 companies from the three alliances who are participating in the CSEP technical committee, actively developing the SEP 2 application level test plan. In addition, at the Wi-Fi Alliance, we have our own task group that is working towards the launch of our Wi-Fi alliance version of our SEP 2 certifications.

Can you give me an idea of what the Wi-Fi Alliance SEP 2 standard is going to look like compared to others, or is this going to be a more refined version of what’s already out there?

ENNIS: No, the SEP 2 application protocol is the same. It’s universal whether its Wi-Fi or ZigBee or HomePlug. What ends up being different is obviously the lower level stuff, the manner in which the security is provided by the underlying technology to support SEP 2, or the way that addresses are configured. But the SEP 2 application is identical. I mean that’s the whole point of this effort, to make sure that all of that stays the same.

I've got a whole series of slides that are actually taken from the presentations that we did at Distributech back in January that incorporated this demo.

What were you looking to emphasize with that demonstration?

ENNIS: We had a number of companies participating, all with Wi-Fi implementations of SEP 2. So Aclara had a Wi-Fi meter running SEP 2. We've got a number of chip companies, T.I., Qualcomm, Broadcom, GainSpan—it's really important to see the chip companies active here, because they're the ones that develop the reference designs that end up getting incorporated by their customers directly into the customers' products.

What we were demoing was interoperability of independent SEP 2 implementations over Wi-Fi. SO we had multiple client devices, like thermostats, a Wi-Fi meter, and then we were also demonstrating interoperability between Wi-Fi and ZigBee implementing SEP 2. We were simulating a demand response load control event, where the utility is running into a brownout situation and they want to send out the SEP 2 command to have the thermostat adjust its set point up higher.

So what are the advantages that that SEP 2 process offers?

ENNIS: Well the big advantage is that it is universally implemented in the devices. It's a single standard that will hit all of these devices. And it will allow them to interact with millions of homes or businesses to adjust the energy usage within each one of their individual consumers slightly, thereby gaining the benefit of a drop in energy consumption [coinciding with] the peak period.

You can find out more about the Wi-Fi Alliance and SEP 2 at Wi-Fi.org.

Would you like to see more utility and energy news like this in your inbox on a daily basis? Subscribe to our Utility Dive email newsletter! You may also want to read Utility Dive's top 12 smart grid, metering and tech lists of the summer.