NIST Smart Grid and CPS Newsletter

June 2016

• Smart Grid Community Loses One of its Leaders, Erich Gunther (1958-2016)

• Facility Smart Grid Information Model: Standard and User’s Manual Published

• Nearly 100 Action Clusters Showcase Their Projects at the Global City Teams Challenge 

Expo, June 13-14, 2016

• IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework Takes Shape During GCTC Expo Week

• Upcoming Meeting: NIST/IEEE Workshop on Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid, October 

26, 2016

• Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service (NTIS) Unveils New Joint 

Venture Opportunities in Data Sharing/Services

• SGIP Update

Smart Grid Community Loses One of its Leaders, Erich 

Gunther (1958-2016)

The smart grid community was deeply saddened last week by the untimely death of one of its 

pioneers, Erich Gunther.

“Erich was an exceptional talent, collaborator, and dear friend to me and many others at NIST,” said 

Dr. David Wollman, Deputy Director of NIST’s Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Program 

Office. “Many of us, both on the NIST Smart Grid team and in the Community Resilience Program, 

had the great privilege of working closely with Erich in recent years. He brought a rare combination 

of intelligence and passion—of head and heart—to his work, his hobbies, and, most of all, to the 

many communities he touched. We offer our deepest condolences to his family, his friends, and his 

co-workers at Enernex.”

Among the many tributes appearing online last week, these two may be of special interest to the 

readers of this newsletter:

• Sharon Allan, President of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), initiated an Erich 

Gunther memorial website at forevermissed.com, and many members of the smart grid 

community have been contributing their tributes, pictures, and stories. NIST launched the 

SGIP as a public-private partnership in 2009, and Erich Gunther (and Enernex) played 

crucial roles in its formation, growth, and evolution. 

• “Smart Grid Today” established a public link to a special issue remembering Erich 

Gunther. The issue contains links to every story that was ever published with Erich 

Gunther’s name in it. (There are more than 50 stories, dating back to 2009.) “The stories 

are open to the public and offered in honor and celebration of his life as a true leader, 

visionary and mentor to the smart grid industry and the broader electricity industry.”

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Facility Smart Grid Information Model: Standard and User’s 

Manual Published

With this month’s publication of ASHRAE/NEMA Standard 201P, Facility Smart Grid Information 

Model (FSGIM), the ability of buildings and the smart grid to share information took a big step 

forward. The new standard provides a common basis for electrical energy consumers to describe, 

manage, and communicate about electrical energy consumptions and forecasts. 

According to Steve Bushby, manager of the NIST Embedded Intelligence in Buildings Program and 

chair of Standard Project Committee (SPC) 201P that developed the standard, “the potential 

benefits of this standard—for both energy providers and facility owners—are very significant. In a 
smart grid world, facilities of all kinds will become partners in managing the electricity grid, 

sometimes providing local generation and moderating loads to balance variations in renewable 

energy supply or meet other grid constraints. The FSGIM provides a common path forward for 

residential, commercial, and industrial control technologies to implement the features needed to 

participate in the smart grid.” 

Almost all electricity is consumed in a building of some kind. This standard attempts to capture the 

breadth and diversity of these consumers by using the term “facility” to refer to a single family 

house, a commercial or institutional building, a manufacturing or industrial building, or multiple 

buildings such as a college campus.

Among the many energy management applications enabled by this standard are potential gamechangers, such as on-site generation, demand response, electrical storage, and peak demand 

management. The FSGIM standard may also play an important role in the emerging technologies 

and systems known as “transactive energy.” This standard builds on and integrates with other smart 

grid standards, including Green Button energy usage standards, BACnet, Smart Energy Profile 

(SEP) 2.0, IEC’s Common Information Model (CIM), and IEC 61850.

The newly published standard is accompanied by a User’s Manual that provides information about 

how to interpret the features of the model. The manual also defines a set of anticipated use cases 

for facility interaction with a smart grid and provides guidance on how to apply the standard to those 

use cases.

The standard development process, which often requires many years, was accelerated for the 

FSGIM by the establishment of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel’s (SGIP) PAP-17 in 2010 (cochairs Steve Bushby, NIST, and Dr. Martin Burns, NIST). PAP-17 played an important role by 

developing use cases that served as the basis for deciding what needed to be included in the 

model. Two standards development organizations—The American Society of Heating, 

Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the National Electrical Manufacturers 

Association (NEMA)—joined forces to move the FSGIM through the development process.

According to Bushby, “Many experts and organizations helped drive the standard development 

process forward. SPC 201P has had contributions from over 50 individual technical experts 

representing utilities, consumer interests, and manufacturers of products for residential, commercial, 

and industrial buildings. It’s been a labor of love for many of us.”

A ballot has been initiated to approve Standard 201 as an International Organization for 

Standardization (ISO) standard, via ISO/Technical Committee 205 Building Environmental Design. If 

approved, the ballot, which is expected to take several months to complete, would move the 

standard to publication as an ISO standard.

Both the ASHRAE/NEMA Standard 201P, Facility Smart Grid Information Model, and the 

accompanying User’s Manual are available online at the ASHRAE Bookstore.

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Nearly 100 Action Clusters Showcase Their Projects at the 

Global City Teams Challenge Expo, June 13-14, 2016

The Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) Expo—convened by NIST and US Ignite earlier this 

month in Austin, Texas—attracted 2000 attendees to see the latest developments in the rapidly 

expanding smart city sector. With more than 110 cities from 11 countries giving on-stage 

presentations and hosting display booths, the Austin Convention Center was, for those two days, 

the center of the smart city universe. 

Each presentation and/or booth featured the ongoing work of a GCTC “action cluster”—a team 

comprising leaders and experts from municipal, technology, and academic organizations. (Copies 

of the presentations are available online.) Many of the action clusters included at least two cities, 

an aspect of the challenge designed to move the smart city community toward scalability and 

replicability. Some action clusters are also looking to integrate smart city technologies across 
several sectors (e.g., energy, transportation, environment, emergency response, lighting, 

etc.). Brief summaries of each of the action clusters are available online.

According to Dr. Sokwoo Rhee, who leads the GCTC effort for NIST, the collaborative action-cluster 

approach is accelerating the pace of technology development and deployment. In an interview with 

StateScoop.com, a media site focusing on news and events in state and local government 

technology, Rhee said, “I’m seeing that the breaking down of silos is really working, and we think 

that will only continue.”

Attendees at the Expo also listened to a mayoral panel, as well as keynote talks from federal and 

state government leaders, including former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who has signed on 

as national advisor to MetroLab Network, a group of 34 city-university partnerships focused on 

bringing data, analytics, and innovation to city government. The MetroLab Network, just like NIST’s 

GCTC 2016 program, was launched as part of the White House’s Smart Cities Initiative in 

September 2015.

Another highlight of the Expo was the announcement of the four action clusters that were selected 

to receive 2016 GCTC Leadership Awards:

• Connected Intelligent Transport (Portland, Oregon) - Grand Prize Winner of $20,000 

• SCALE: Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Network (Montgomery County, Maryland) 

• IoT-Based IDP Tracking and Monitoring System (Taraba, Nigeria) 

• Hyperlocal Testbeds for Citizen Science (Boston, Massachusetts) 

The GCTC Expo served as the mid-point of the GCTC 2016 initiative. In the coming months, the 

action clusters will continue to refine and deploy their projects, and measure progress toward goals 

and key performance indicators. The Challenge will culminate next year with a major Expo event, 

currently being planned for June 2017 in Washington, D.C.

For additional information about the GCTC program, please visit http://www.nist.gov/cps/sagc.cfm

and www.globalcityteams.org.

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IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework Takes Shape During 

GCTC Expo Week

As the hundreds of attendees and action cluster members were packing up at the end of the GCTC 

Expo, a smaller group of over two dozen experts convened for an intense two-day workshop of the 

IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework (IES-City Framework) international technical working group 

(June 15-16, 2016). The meeting brought together the three working groups who are engaged in 

identifying pivotal points of interoperability (PPI) that are common to the dozens of smart city 

frameworks and platforms being developed by organizations around the world.

IES-City Framework, an outgrowth of the GCTC, is designed to distill common features from the 

many participating clusters. This technical analytical activity assesses the broad scope of GCTCparticipating technologies and stakeholders by discovering the alignment, gaps, and overlaps of 

solutions. As a result, interoperable and composable smart city applications are anticipated to 

emerge. 

According to Dr. Martin Burns, who is leading the program for NIST, the three working groups have 

been making excellent progress since the effort was launched in March 2016. At the workshop this 

month in Austin, they shared preliminary results and developed an integrated outline for the final 

report, which is expected to be published this autumn.

The IES-City Framework project, launched just three months ago with kickoff events in North 

America (Gaithersburg, Maryland) and Europe (Rome, Italy), will:

• describe the landscape of smart city applications and requirements for readiness of cities 

and municipalities to absorb them;
• compare and distill current architectural efforts;

• identify pivotal points of interoperability (PPI) across the many existing and deployed 

architectures; and

• produce a consensus framework document of common architectural features.

This framework document will help cities deploy interoperable and scalable smart city solutions that 

will meet the needs of their communities. It will help cities plan roadmaps to acquire these solutions 

for their citizens. It will help SDOs converge their efforts on smart cities and IoT. Finally, it will help 

vendors of products and solutions meld their offerings to allow for composable smart city 

deployments in the future.

Participation in the working groups and framework activity is open to anyone. For additional details, 

see https://pages.nist.gov/smartcitiesarchitecture/. 

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Upcoming Meeting: NIST/IEEE Workshop on Timing 

Challenges in the Smart Grid, October 26, 2016

Registration is now open for the NIST/IEEE Workshop on Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid 

(Gaithersburg, Maryland, October 26, 2016). The goals of the workshop are to clearly identify and 

analyze:

• the practical challenges that are currently being experienced in wide-area time 

synchronization in current measurement and control deployments; and

• timing-related barriers that prevent the power industry from realizing future measurement 

and control technologies.

Dr. Doug Arnold, the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol co-chair, will be chairing the event. Utilities 

planning to provide their perspectives on application precision timing requirements, experiences, 

and challenges include Bonneville Power Administration, Dominion Virginia Power, Pacific Gas and 

Electric, and Southern California Edison. Workshop organizers plan to initiate discussion on 

potential solutions and evaluate the need for standard and metrology enhancements. A NIST report 

summarizing the challenges of wide-area clock synchronization and potential solutions will be 

drafted.

The workshop steering committee has issued a call for abstracts on the following topics: 

• stakeholder perspective on wide-area time synchronization needs and challenges;

• future applications requiring wide-area time synchronization and timing requirements for 

distributed measurement and control;

• research/practice in GPS receiver calibration and testing;

• research/practice in assembling techniques to enable fault tolerant wide-area time 

synchronization; and

• research/practice in deploying and testing IEEE1588 (using Power Profile or wide-area 

deployment).

Please submit an abstract to tsg_steering@nist.gov by July 17, 2016.

For additional details about the workshop and its organizers, please visit the workshop webpage.

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Commerce Department’s National Technical Information 

Service (NTIS) Unveils New Joint Venture Opportunities in 

Data Sharing/Services
The Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service (NTIS) has published a 

Federal Register notice (FRN) announcing a new joint venture partnership (JVP) opportunity

focused on improving access, analysis, and use of federal data. According to the FRN, NTIS is 

seeking proposals from potential joint venture partners “to improve access, data interoperability, 

search, or use of federal data and data services to drive innovation and business outcome.”

Among the federal priorities likely to be supported by the new NTIS-enabled joint ventures are 

cyber-physical systems, smart cities, the Internet of Things. big data, open data, and open access.

Since its founding in the early 1960s, NTIS (not to be confused with NIST, also an agency of the 

Commerce Department) has met its mission of widely disseminating federal science and 

engineering information and data largely through its database of more than three million 

publications in 350 subject areas. As technology has evolved, NTIS has increasingly focused on 

providing its federal customers with online data and services, and the new JVP data program will 

accelerate that trend.

“We are excited about this new direction for NTIS,” said Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. 

“Finding innovative ways to utilize the federal government’s expansive data resources will provide 

great opportunities for public-private sector collaboration.”

“Data is a major currency of the 21st century,” added Avi Bender, the newly appointed director of 

NTIS. “NTIS has unique legislative authority to match federal agencies that collect, use, and 

disseminate valuable data sets with highly qualified private sector partners. We want to make it 

easier for federal agencies to efficiently use and share their data in agile and innovative ways.”

An in-person informational session and webcast to augment information in the FRN and answer 

questions from the public is scheduled for Thursday, July 7, at 9 a.m., Eastern Time. For location 

details and to register go to the NTIS homepage.

The deadline for submitting proposals is August 1, 2016.

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SGIP Update

Registration is now open for SGIP’s 2016 Annual Conference, which will be held November 7-10, 

2016, at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. Billed as the 2016 Grid Modernization Summit, the 

theme is “Accelerating Transformation.” The speaker program will include utility, vendor, and 

industry senior executives, FERC, government, regulators, national labs, and consultants. NIST 

staff members continue to participate actively in SGIP technical sessions and will be contributing to 

the conference.

SGIP and NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Association) hosted a June 23 webinar titled 

“New IPRM Standard Provides Framework for Smart Grid Testing and Certification” (archived here 

online). During the webinar, members of the Smart Grid Testing and Certification Committee 

(SGTCC)—including NIST’s Cuong Nguyen, who led the committee’s effort—discussed the 

motivation for the development of this framework, provided a high-level overview of the standard, 

and described the standardization process.

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