Interoperability to enable freedom and innovation

The major challenge is to procure a number of different interchangeable parts from a variety of different providers worldwide and put them all together simply. This is where standards can make a major enabling difference and why there is so much focus and efforts today.

There is a huge need for interoperability standards that will allow buying pieces of equipment from any vendor and knowing that they will work in the same way. It's more than interface standards, because they have to interact at a deep level in the same way. Instead of imposing global detailed technical specifications that could be used as blue prints for entire equipments, it is much more powerful to do it at some key interfaces. This is how efficient standards for interoperability are creating a huge area of freedom and innovation for the benefit of manufacturers and the utilities.

Smart Grid - standards help interoperability.

A lot of confusion

There is a lot of confusion in the discussions, because no one is really talking about the same thing; the ultimate interoperability allowing a total plug and play “model construction kit” is probably out of reasonable reach. Interoperability is generally being discussed too broadly and should be considered with a focus placed on prioritization and acceleration of the adoption of “inter-system” standards.

What is realistic is defining boundaries where major progress can bring quick benefits without jeopardizing future successive improvements. And then at each boundary, the “deepness” of interoperability should be defined: Using the same dictionary? Talking the same language? Plug and play capability? Total interchangeability? etc…

Each group of stakeholder seems to over-emphasize its own focus, and very often it turns out to become an Information Technology or Telecommunication debate. The discussions tend to become too technical, too detailed, and too quick to loose sense of the energy nature of the system.