This is a press release filed in the "not surprised" category. When I was at the ABB Automation and Power World conference a couple of months ago, executives were practically like kids in anticipation of Christmas at the thought of all the U.S. government money that might be poured into the economy to improve infrastructure. So, therefore, we hear that ABB North America CEO Enrique Santacana "seeks greater urgency in creating open standards at Smart Grid Leadership meeting in Washington, D.C." He was participating in a special Smart Grid Leadership meeting called by U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, last week in Washington, D.C.
Santacana called for greater collaboration within the industry and with government leaders, as well as a greater sense of urgency among all stakeholders in creating new industry-wide open standards for smart grid development in the United States and elsewhere.
"We believe that development and adoption of open protocols and systems are necessary for the U.S. to properly develop the emerging Smart Grid," said Santacana. "ABB's extensive global experience, combined with innovative products, systems and technologies, can clearly help to provide direction and guide this effort. This challenge will require a greater collaboration and sense of urgency from all stakeholders, and we are certainly willing to play our part."
The Smart Grid Leadership meeting was a kickoff to last week's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Interim Smart Grid Standards Interoperability Roadmap Summit. NIST has been charged with coordinating standards bodies for the Smart Grid. ABB participated in the first NIST workshop in April, and sent seven global power experts to participate in last week's roadmap-working sessions.
All ABB transmission and distribution protection and control devices used in substation and distribution automation devices such as relays, communication gateways and substation controllers are compliant with the IEC 61850 standard of the International Electrotechnical Institute. ABB claims to have the largest installed base of IEC 61850 devices globally, extending to more than 600 electric power systems in 57 countries.
As announced earlier by DOE Secretary Chu and Commerce Secretary Locke, IEC 61850 will serve as the initial smart grid interoperability standard for substation automation and protection.
One of my colleagues complained in his blog about the lack of mention of ISA in the standards roundup for the smart grid, but this clearly is not in the normal purview of that body.
1:50:34 PM 
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