CIGRE and the smart grid

I spent last week in Paris for the CIGRE exposition at a conference center just down the street from the famously triumphant Arc de Triomphe. But, while Napoleon’s victories may still be celebrated in the stone arch of the Arc, I was surprised that CIGRE’s exposition showed few victories for the area of transmission and distribution we all hear so much about---the smart grid.

CIGRE stands for Conseil International des Grands Reseaux Electriques---or, in the not-so-queen’s-English: International Council on Large Electric Systems. Established in 1921, the group is one of the leading organizations on electric power systems, covering their technical, economic, environmental, organizational and regulatory aspects. A non-profit association based in France, CIGRE leans heavily toward transmission and pops up in Paris in exhibition form every two years for a week of complicated sessions.

When I first went to CIGRE two years ago in 2008, they were breaking record attendance numbers at 4400. While my contact hasn’t told me what the numbers were yet for this year, I guarantee you they were large, as always. That’s not surprising. They’re always large. What was surprising was the lack of smart grid focus. (There was more on it two years ago, actually.) No long sessions on the subject, few exhibitors touting it. The show was heavy on hardware and light on the PR of the smart grid. Since smart grid is pretty much all anyone talks about with transmission and distribution these days here in the U.S., color me surprised to show up at a large international conference that chats most about overhead lines, audible noise and transformers---that really is all about the basics of the electric grid.

And, yet, it was not a ghost town. The floor was packed. The sessions were full. And, it got me thinking about rabbits.

Yes, rabbits. Well, one rabbit in particular.

After a long day of sessions at CIGRE, I wandered up to the art district by the Sacre Coeur church. I have a soft spot for that area, a place of poets and artists from the turn of the last century. Down a side street is a cabaret called Au Lapin Agile which has been around, in one form or another, since the time of green fairies and Toulouse-Lautrec. (Latrec used to use the owner as a model for some of his posters). There’s a famous story about this spot, translated into The Nimble Rabbit in English. An early 20th century French novelist so hated modern artists like Picasso, so thought them fluff and garbage and a bunch of hooey, that he tied a paintbrush to the tail of a donkey and showed the finished product as art at a salon, naming it “Sunset over the Adriatic.”

France has always been a place of rather pointed commentary, and, while I actually like Picasso and other cubists that the novelist was attempting to skewer with his donkey canvas, I have to admit that the French ability to preach a novel without saying a single actual word seemed poignant given what I’d encountered that day at the conference center. It crossed over to the CIGRE floor and sessions in my overactive imagination. Was the decided lack of smart grid information, smart grid details and smart grid exhibits at CIGRE a commentary on what the smart grid actually is---or, more pointedly, what it actually is not?

Granted, some of this is because the smart grid, as we know it, has focused almost entirely on the distribution end of the game, but, the fact is, that we need to make this grid intelligent from the meter all the way back to the power plant, and, if transmission isn’t in the equation yet (as CIGRE might show us), we have millions of miles to go before we sleep, to steal a bit from Frost’s little poem, which isn't about rabbits at all.