I blogged earlier about new NIST standards relating to the smart grid.  In North America communication networks for automated meters and meter reading tends to be proprietary, locking utilities into one metering vendor, whereas in Europe there has been focus on open interoperability.  The business benefit is more competition and lower prices. 

The EU is the world’s second largest energy market.  In 2006 the European Commission published a Green Paper in which a common European energy policy was proposed focussed on sustainability, competition and security and addressing issues such as dependence on energy imports, volatility in energy prices, climate change, rising demand, and obstacles to to a competitive internal energy market.

The Green Paper proposed that the EU should be a leader in addressing climate change and developing cleaner and more sustainable technologies including biomass, renewable energy sources, and carbon capture and clean fossil fuel technologies.

The Green paper also proposed creating an open, competitive energy market.  In the EU many national energy markets are still protected and dominated by a few companies.  The objectives is to open up these markets to fair competition for companies within the EU. A key requirement to enable this to happen is a European energy grid with common rules and standards to give suppliers open access to all national grids. 

The European Technology Platform (ETP) SmartGrids was set up in 2005 to create a joint vision for the European energy grid.  Among the key elements of this vision is standards

• “Establishing shared technical standards and protocols that will ensure open access, enabling the deployment of equipment from any chosen manufacturer”.

The PRIME (PoweRline Intelligent Metering Evolution) Alliance was formed to develop an open communications infrastructure to support large-scale metering and other Smart Grid projects. The goal of the alliance is to define, test and develop the framework in which meters and other devices can interoperate. PRIME co-founders Current Group LLC, Iberdrola, and other partners announced at the European Metering, Billing/CRM Conference taking place in Barcelona, Spain this week that it has successfully demonstrated the interoperability of the first ever open metering solution in support of Europe’s Smart Grid Roadmap.