03/01/14 GE' s MCDONALD: Ecuador takes bold steps toward smart grid | Smart Grid Today

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GE's McDONALD: Ecuador takes bold steps
toward smart grid
SGIP board chair shares 'secret' for successful deployments
3 de enero de 2014
Ecuador is ramping up smart grid efforts and taking a leading role in the region, John McDonald, GE Digital
Energy's director of technology strategy and business development, told us yesterday. He is chairman of
SGIP's board of directors, which works to harmonize global smart grid standards and described Ecuador's
efforts to take the lead.
He cited the unprecedented depth of Ecuador's smart grid roadmap and the involvement of the nation's
wholesale power operator, the National Energy Control Center (CENACE, pronounced "seh-NAH-seh") in
the SGIP as the first Latin American power entity to join as a voting, dues-paying member.
McDonald was on hand two years ago in Ecuador for what he called the country's first conference devoted
to smart grid. By sending Ecuador's minister of electricity and renewable energy to speak at the conference,
the government signaled its strong backing for smart grid, McDonald said.
On the sidelines of that conference in late 2011, officials from CENACE told him they were putting an overall
strategy together for the country for smart grid but a missing component was smart grid standards. Due to a
lack of in-house expertise, they hoped SGIP could help craft a country-wide strategy, McDonald said.
CENACE's overture led to the wholesale power operator and SGIP in July 2012 agreeing formally to
collaborate on standards. The deal along with ones like it with Brazil, South Korea and others, lets signatories
benefit from areas of SGIP expertise such as smart grid IT architecture, he added.
As CENACE was working on harmonizing grid standards with SGIP, the wholesale power operator was
helping design a national smart grid roadmap for the next several years. That set of guidelines, announced last
January, aims for "a new model of power management" through "advanced technologies of measurement,
monitoring and communication," said a translated webpage from Ecuador's Ministry of Electricity &
Renewable Energy (MERE).
QUOTABLE: I had never seen a blueprint done like that, in that much detail, by an entire country.
John McDonald, GE Digital Energy's director of technology strategy and business development
and chairman of SGIP's board of directors
The group that developed the roadmap included CENACE, MERE and Ecuador's main utility and its power
regulator. That group asked global firms working in smart grid to present the latest technologies on the
market, he added, including reaching out "to companies outside of Ecuador in a big way in this process."
McDonald was part of a GE team that presented the firm's smart grid technologies to CENACE, he added.
GE in 2011 supplied an Ecuadorean municipal utility with about 25,000 smart meters for an AMI pilot in the
city of Guayaquil (SGT, 2011-Oct-11).
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Government backing helps
Having firm government backing for grid modernization and a plan to carry it out will give utilities the certainty
they need to invest in smart grid technologies, McDonald believes.
QUOTABLE: When you put your budget together for the next year at a utility in terms of what you're
going to spend money on, you're going to be much more prone to thinking about smart grid, thinking
about investing in the technology, thinking about the benefits and the drivers, because everybody
around you is doing it and the country is doing it. McDonald
McDonald recently returned from what he called Ecuador's second national smart grid conference, a follow-
up to the one in 2011 that led to SGIP's collaboration with CENACE.
His 'secret' for success
At the most recent conference, in late November, McDonald stressed the need for utilities to integrate smart
meters, AMI communications, GIS (geographic information systems), OMS (outage management systems)
and DMS (data management systems). "The secret is not just investing in these five components, but the real
secret is integrating these five together," he added.
He sees too little focus at utilities in general on integrating these communication systems that provide "another
level of benefits, not only to the utility but to the utility's customers." For utilities in Ecuador and throughout
Latin America, where power theft is rampant, added incentive exists to integrate these smart grid components
to prevent meter tampering, McDonald said.