Progress towards building a smart power grid took a leap forward this week with the release of grid interoperability standards and increases to grant awards to achieve this "urgent national priority."

As support from the Obama administration continues alongside growing demands for enhanced energy stability and reduced emissions, companies like Cisco are rushing to develop smart grid communications technology.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the 16 smart grid standards after serving as chairmen at an energy industry meeting, a gathering that was intended to foster standards adoption by key players. Together they emphasized the urgency of advancing the electric power grid, and echoed the industry need for open source that have been previously voiced by groups like the ZigBee Alliance.

“We took a significant step toward developing the open and transparent interoperability standards necessary to realize the Smart Grid vision,” said Secretary Locke. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which has been working on smart grid standards since 2007 under the Energy Independence and Security Act, recognized the initial 16 standards, which will allow for compatibility between numerous competing technologies.

The two Secretaries announced that the Department if Energy would be increasing the smart grid program awards under the Recovery Act, raising the maximum Smart Grid Investment Grant Program award from $20 to $200 million and Smart Grid Demonstration Project awards from $40 to $100 million. In addition, $10 million in stimulus funds will be provided to the National Institute of Standards and Technology to support standards development.

Getting all of the equipment and service providers who participate in the grid to communicate will be like herding cats. "The smart grid is very heterogeneous, and anyone acting like it’s homogeneous is vastly oversimplifying it," said Steve Widergren, Smart Grid Interoperability & Standards Coordinator for the DOE, earlier this month.

Because pieces of the smart grid were developed independently to work in a smaller universe, getting them all to work together is a formidable task. IT giants like Cisco are addressing that challenge.

Utilities are looking for open standards so they won’t be forced to buy from one provider and non-standards based hardware upgrades are no picnic. As one of the companies that worked to develop DOCSIS (international cable standard), Cisco is intimately familiar with the issues that can arise with open standards.

Cisco announced this week that they be developing their smart grid strategy, aggressively moving into smart grid communications infrastructure, which they refer to as an estimated $20 billion annual market as systems are rolled out over the next five years and according to one of their senior VPs, is a one of their “key market priorities.” Their plan involves building on their existing infrastructure by working on networking and security solutions for smart grid communications, home and enterprise energy management,

While some of Cisco’s work is redirecting existing technology towards electrical grid applications, such as putting wide area network routers on utility poles. The company aims to eventually have devices that will allow for home devices not only to display power consumption, but also to communicate with other nearby devices and connect to a utility. Keeping utilities and consumers connected would reduce power usage during peak times.

Cisco will be working with a number of utilities worldwide and began recently their “Energy Smart Miami” involvement with General Electric, Florida Power & Light and Silver Spring Networks to deploy Miami smart grid tech (Cisco is also planning work to monitor energy usage, and engage citizens with social media, in San Francisco, along with a project partnering with NASA to analyze emissions.

Cisco will be building on their EnergyWise network, an energy management tool that runs through Cisco Catalyst network switches. Cisco’s new switches and routers are also intended to monitor and reduce power consumption in the home and will also be working inevitably with smart meters as they are further implemented.

Cisco also has plans to address growing security issues that come with large network areas; an evolution that will be spurred undoubtedly by their work in pilot projects like Energy Smart Miami and the Pecan Street Project.

Oracle's Utilities division has introduced smart grid software - that helps utilities to leverages advances in IT, communications technology and energy technology to make power delivery more efficient while reducing emissions. The software will be used by utilities in demand response and energy conversation programs and to manage the integration of intermittent renewable energy.

The suite of software includes applications for managing advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) smart meters, customer service and billing, analyzing utility loads, and complying with federal reporting regulations.

Chairman of the GridWise Alliance Guido Bartels said that communicating with the federal secretaries showed confidence that Smart Grid standards will be completed by September and that the decision made this week will “put the US on the fast track globally and help the US become the world leader in smart grid development.” Big players like Cisco making their way into smart grid development will provide the continued market attention that the formation of the energy grid of the future requires.