Podcast

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GridWeek attendees have a full schedule of meetings and working sessions today. In the afternoon kick-off plenary session, the DOE assistant director of R&D will lead a discussion with panelists from EPRI, Sempra, Endurant and EnerNex. For today's podcast I interviewed panelist Erich Gunther, co-founder and CTO of EnerNex Corporation.

EnerNex is an electric power engineering and consulting firm specializing in new electric power technologies. The firm provides services to energy producers, distributors, users, and research organizations. Its primary products are reports, data and technical advice.

Questions for Erich Gunther

• Various organizations -- GridWise, Intelligrid, MGI and others -- are meeting at GridWeek this morning. They're all working on designs for the modern grid. Are their visions are at all consistent?

• When someone is getting involved with modernizing the grid, and they ask which of these many organizations they should align with, how do they go about answering that question?

• It's a big job to develop such a complex architecture. There's the consensus on a vision, the R&D, the implementation...What part of that job is the most challenging?

• What about the business case for these complex systems? Is there sufficient motivation for all the players to take the steps they need to take?

• In the early days of the internet, few people were thinking about security and privacy, which of course now are major concerns. As the grid starts to resemble the net, can we avoid those problems?

Tomorrow morning I'll be talking with Kevin Kolevar, Director of the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability.