Had a chance to speak with Bill Anderson, the Navy's Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Project Manager who's leading a worldwide team of over fifty engineers, laying the AMI foundation towards the Navy's future Smart Grid infrastructure. For background on AMI, click
here. Anderson described his project as having several phases:
- 2-4 years for building out the AMI infrastructure, then,
- 2-3 years for putting the rest of the Smart Grid components in place
He emphasized that as they seek to enable the "utility of the future," he and his team realize that they are laying the foundation for a "yet to be defined" US Navy Smart Grid. I like that this team openly acknowledges that they don't know enough yet to describe the details of the ultimate system they're building, and that some key challenges, like energy storage, remain to be solved.
On the security side, networks, comm gear and devices are all being held to the same standards the Navy uses for the rest of its IT operations, including the the DOD Information Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process (DIACAP)'s certification and accreditation processes. These standards are DoDI 8510.1 which binds DOD users to the information assurance (IA) controls defined in DoDD 8500.1 and DoDI 8500.2. It would be interesting to see how tuned in the Navy is to the Smart Grid standards work being done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Stay tuned as Anderson's team completes its initial AMI pilot at Naval Base Ventura County and the Navy moves out on the program's next steps.
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