[arin-ppml] Straw poll on special policy for electric energy industry

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

I happen to have my home
electric service from PGE and my home is one of the ones that
they are trialling remote utility meters on.  6 months ago
PGE replaced the electric meter on my house with a smart
meter that they can read remotely, we haven't had a meter
reader at hour home since.

I cannot understand why PGE would even want
to apply a public IPv4 OR IPv6 number to my home meter
when they can make all the private IPv4 numbers they need.

I thus see this policy as premature.  Before
crying Chicken Little, and putting a policy into place that
is not needed and could do harm, I think you should ascertain
if applying public IPv4 addresses to meters is even a common
practice in the electric power industry.  One example of
mis-engineered protocol posted to the IETF list does not
mean we have a problem.

What IS becoming more common is the use of SCADA systems
on high voltage power lines, and in substations, that use
TCP/IP.  However, once more, I see no benefit and a lot of
potential problems for electric power companies to use
public numbers for such systems.

If your interested in such a policy I would suggest you
contact Sensus http://www.sensus.com/ who supplied the
meters that PGE used, and ask them if they use IP addressing.
PGE uses AMI meters using FlexNet:

http://na.sensus.com/Module/Catalog/Category/electric?id=47

There's plenty of material there as well as contacts you
can email.

While I doubt that PGE would know what an IPv4 or IPv6
number is, I would guess that Sensus could answer your
concerns regarding IP utilization.  From looking over
the marketing material, it certainly does not appear that
they assign 1 IP number per meter.

Ted


michael.dillon at bt.com wrote:
> This is just a question to see what people think about creating a
> special policy that applies to companies wishing to provide
> infrastructure for the electric utility industry Smart Grid.
> 
> Basically, the situation is this as described by Richard Shockey on the
> IETF list:
> 
>    Myself and others are deeply concerned by how this effort is
> developing.
>    There is no current consensus on what the communications architecture
> of the
>    SmartGrid is or how IP actually fits into it.
> 
>    The Utility Industry does not understand the current IPv4 number
> exhaust
>    problem and the consequences of that if they want to put a IP address
> on
>    every Utility Meter in North America.
> 
>    What is equally troubling is that many of the underlying protocols
> that
>    utilities wish to deploy are not engineered for IPv6. We have an
> example of
>    that in a recent ID.
> 
> Basically, what I am suggesting is that we introduce a special policy
> that
> bans the Electric Utility industry from receiving any IPv4 addressing at
> all,
> either direct ARIN allocations or ISP assignments, if those addresses
> are intended
> for any kind of Smart Grid application. This ban would also apply to
> third parties
> and subcontractors who might be operating components of the Smart Grid.
> 
> Note that this special policy would not apply to any other use of IP in
> an
> electric utility company, only to the Smart Grid.
> 
> This would send a clear message to the utility industry that there is
> simply not enough IPv4 address space left for a new major user, and
> would
> help them get their plans around IPv6 worked out earlier, rather than 
> wasting their time and money on something that will NEVER fly.
> 
> Seems to me this fits well within ARIN's educational purpose.
> 
> If possible, we should try to word this policy in such a way that it
> could be adopted by the other RIRs because the Smart Grid movement is
> now world wide.
> 
> --Michael Dillon
> _______________________________________________
> PPML
> You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to
> the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List (ARIN-PPML at arin.net).
> Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at:
> http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml
> Please contact info at arin.net if you experience any issues.