Challenges of the evolving "Smart Grid"

• Brian Gaucher, IBM Research

• Abstract: There are major electric grid challenges facing the nation and the world today, from the aging limited infrastructure to capacity constraints as demand continues to grow. Evolving the 1880’s heterogeneous electric grid infrastructure to that of a Smart Grid capable of handling the required growth, resiliency, real-time requirements and security needed for the future requires overcoming a number of major challenges.

  This talk will briefly define the Smart Grid as we see it and will present vignettes of ongoing and planned research to address these many challenges:

  • Developing secure, reliable, resilient communications that will handle evolving real-time events, while limiting the possibility of a cyber attack.
  • Development and integration of renewable distributed energy resources, which are intermittent by nature and geographically distributed.
  • Developing new or improved energy storage e.g. new battery chemistries with 5-10x energy density that enable dual use electric vehicles, transportation and storage.
  • Improving the energy efficiency of existing infrastructure and equipment e.g. buildings, data centers.
  • Addressing a grand challenge of modeling Grid stability, operation, planning and maintenance in near real-time to enable the capacity growth over the existing physical infrastructure and limit catastrophic events like the 2003 blackout.

• Biography: Brian Gaucher performed his undergraduate work at U-Mass and graduate work at Northeastern University (’93). From 1982-83 he worked at Alpha Industries R&D lab designing microwave GaAsFET amplifiers, switches detectors limiters, filters and supercomponents. In 1984 he joined GTE Communication Systems Division, working in the area of research and development of secure spread spectrum communication and radar systems for the military, across the 900 MHz to 60 GHz frequency bands. In 1993 he joined IBM, where he is a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He managed a communication system design and characterization group, where his research interests included cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi, UWB and 60 GHz multi-Gbps wireless communication design, 77& 94GHz radar and biomedical applications of wireless technology, in advanced CMOS and SiGe. His group has helped more than five products to market in this space. He also managed a worldwide team of >100 people developing standards compliant High-speed-serial (HSS) link solutions up to 25Gbps with advanced equalization in advanced CMOS. Today he is a manager in IBM’s Smarter Energy initiative coordinating and helping to develop IBM's Smart Grid solutions.

  He is an IBM master inventor with over 40 US and foreign patents pending, filed or issued He has received one corporate award, three outstanding technical achievement awards, an RDA and has authored or co-authored over 50 papers, and one book. He is an active member of the IEEE.